


The Timberlake Effect

by luxshine



Category: Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Popslash
Genre: AU, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-22
Updated: 2011-03-22
Packaged: 2017-10-17 05:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 44,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/173188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxshine/pseuds/luxshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Justin learns the hard way that acts have consequences, and as he does so, his life changes drastically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Here we Go

**Author's Note:**

> Ahem. I blame Ashton Kutcher, my own denial regarding *N Sync, Chris’s sexyness, and my desire to try and write a convincing Justin for this. Also? I blame Quantum Leap, Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, Butterfly Effect and milosflaca unholy love for The Simpsons and Futurama. You’ve been warned. This was betaed by the lovely patchworkdragon so I’d ask for a round of applause to her.

There was one thing that was very clear in Justin’s mind as the problem unfolded.

It wasn’t his fault.

It could’ve been Chris’s fault, or Lance’s fault, or Joey’s fault. Even JC’s fault. But not **his** fault. After all, it was the golden rule, the one his mother had taught him at a very early age. No matter what happened, it was **never** Justin’s fault.

After all, it wasn’t as if he knew that **it** was going to happen.

No one could predict what had happened.

* * *

After the MTV interview, Justin had felt somewhat relieved. Saying out loud that *N Sync was a thing of the past lifted a weight from his shoulders, a weight he had been carrying for two years since he had started the vote to decide what was going to happen with the group.

But they hadn’t told the fans, and just for that he had always felt a little guilty. Now that guilt was gone. And he could concentrate on the important stuff of his life without more worries. Important stuff like his new album, the new tour, and the next movie.

“Justin?” JC’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts. “You ok?”

“Yeah, just thinking,” Justin said, turning off the sound console. “What do you say if we take a break?”

They had been working together in JC’s song for a week now, and while Justin was very happy where the track was going, that day he didn’t seem to be able to concentrate on anything. He‘d had a meeting with Johnny to start making plans for his new tour, but it had been a short, almost unimportant meeting.

“Sure, let’s go grab something to eat,” JC smiled, taking off the earphones.

The walk to the studio cafeteria was a short one, and JC talked the whole time. Justin liked to hear JC talk, because he never picked one subject and stayed with it, he usually just jumped from one to the other with no warning. So Justin could choose not to pay attention and even so be able to pick up the conversation if JC expected an answer.

“And Chris is finally getting out of his depression, which is a lucky thing since he volunteered to take care of Briahna for the week,” JC said as they entered the cafeteria, making Justin frown.

“Chris is depressed? Since when?” Justin raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t talked to Chris since JC’s birthday party, and Chris hadn’t looked particularly depressed then. Maybe a little subdued, but Justin had guessed it was just a phase or something.

“Since Joey’s wedding, at least,” JC looked at him, confused. “You must have noticed, Justin. Chris hasn’t been himself since then. Anyway, Lance told me that when they spoke last week Chris sounded a lot better. That was when Joey asked him to babysit for him and Kelly.”

“Chris spoke to Lance last week?” Justin’s frown deepened. Chris hadn’t called him in months, and Justin had assumed that Chris was doing the hermit thing again and that JC’s party had been a fluke. “On the phone?”

“No, he went to visit him and Reichen,” JC answered, and went to get something to drink. Justin shook his head. It wasn’t that he missed Chris, but he had hoped that Chris would call him if he was depressed.

That night he went home to an empty house because Cameron’s meeting with her agent had gone too long, so he indulged himself in one of the habits he knew Cameron hated. He pulled out one of his old photograph albums, and started flipping through the pages of his memories with the group.

Chris had always been his best friend, had always looked for him back in the beginning when Justin wasn’t sure that things were going to work. As the years passed, they had somehow grown a little distant, but Justin had always been able to count on Chris to be **there**.

The fact that Chris was talking to JC, and Lance, and probably Joey too, instead of talking to Justin didn’t mesh with Justin’s view of the universe.

He flipped quickly through the pages of the group together, a long collection of official photoshoots and candid pictures, before stopping at the pages dedicated to the third Challenge, the last one before the hiatus that was more of a break up than a hiatus. Justin sighed. As much as he was enjoying doing his own thing, he did kind of miss those times.

He stopped at one of the pictures of the five of them together. JC and Lance were wearing the blue tank-tops, Joey, the red one with the white one under it, Chris was only wearing a white one, and Justin had been wearing a white one over a red t-shirt. They all were smiling at the camera, and why not? It was 2001, and none of them knew what was going to happen over the year. Behind them there was a sign with the Challenge logo that read Players Only.

Justin sighed, still focused on the picture. Chris didn’t look depressed them, and he had to admit that his smile was perhaps a bit brighter than the smiles Justin had seen on Chris’s face for the last year. On the other hand, back then they were on the top. Chris had reasons to smile.

Suddenly, the picture **rippled** and Justin blinked. It had been a split second thing, as if the picture was a pool of water and someone had thrown a stone into it, although of course, that was impossible. He shook his head and looked at it again, Chris’s smile, his own smile, frowning. He figured that he was just tired, and that was all. However, as he was watching, it happened **again**.

And this time it wasn’t only the picture that seemed to pulse and move away like waves on a lake. It was **everything** around Justin. The picture, the album, his **house**. In the distance, he could hear his phone ringing.

Dizzy, Justin blinked and everything stopped.

However, he wasn’t in his house anymore.

In front of him there was a white wall with a sign that read “*N Sync’s Challenge for the Children. Players Only Beyond this line.”

* * *

“O.k. This is officially weird,” Justin said, looking around. He supposed he could have been dreaming, but that made no sense since he couldn’t remember falling asleep. Of course, that was the only explanation. He had to be asleep because there was no way he was standing in the aisle to the dressing rooms of their third Challenge.

He looked down at himself, and he was still dressed in the same jeans and black wife beater he had been wearing down at the studio with JC. He felt awake, but he couldn’t be awake.

Justin glared at the Challenge sign. Either he was asleep and dreaming of the past, or he had been day-dreaming the past seven years which was the most stupid idea he could imagine. One didn’t day-dream seven years of life in detail. He hoped.

“Justin? What are you doing here? And why are you dressed like that?” Chris walked towards him, dressed in the same black shorts and white tank top from the picture, looking thinner and younger than what Justin remembered. “What happened to your face?”

“I just,” Justin shook his head. “It’s only, no. I think I’m lost.”

Chris looked at him, frowning. “You look weird, Justin. And you can’t be lost. It’s a straight aisle. Are you high?”

“No!” Justin shook his head. “I just think I’m dreaming…”

“Dreaming?” Chris raised his eyebrows, and, without warning, pinched him. “I don’t think so.”

“Ouch!” Justin recoiled away from Chris. “Woah, stop that!”

“If it hurt, you’re not dreaming. What’s wrong, Justin?”

Justin started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. Apparently, he had dreamed the last seven years of his life while standing in front of the wall. Maybe he had taken something, even if he couldn’t remember doing so. What mattered was that everything around him was real. “Nothing. I’m fine. We’re together, right? We’re still a group, and you’re not singing rock, I’m not producing songs for JC, Joey is not acting, and Lance hasn’t told us he’s gay, so, I’m fine.”

“ **Lance** is gay?” Chris asked him, confused. Justin was going to tell him that no, that **that** had been part of a very complicated day dream when the world seemed to ripple around him again. It was a strange feeling, like if he had just been on the Magic Teacup ride at Disneyland for hours.

The last thing he saw before closing his eyes trying to fight the impulse to throw up was himself, dressed in his blue uniform, chatting with Lance.


	2. Together Again

[   
](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/challengeIII.jpg)

  
[   
](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/challengeIII.jpg)   


  
Justin blinked as the world focused itself around him and he had barely time to move away the photography album before throwing up on his carpet.

“Oh, boy,” he said out loud even when he knew he was alone. “ **That** was the weirdest acid flashback ever.”

He rose from his couch and walked towards the kitchen, looking for something to clean up with. While he and Cameron had hired a cleaning lady to come up every day, he didn’t want to go to sleep knowing that there was vomit drying up on his floor.

As he washed his mouth, trying to get the taste out, he noticed a note on his refrigerator door that he hadn’t seen when he had arrived from the studio.

“Justin, don’t forget the meeting at Jive tomorrow at 10. Love, Cam.”

He picked up the note, frowning. He hadn’t heard Cameron come in, and if she had left him a note it was because she had gone out again. How long had he spent staring at that old picture, anyway?

Trying not to think about it, he crushed the note into a little ball and threw it to the trash. What he needed was a long night sleep. In the morning he would worry about the meeting at Jive. Besides, he was pretty sure that the meeting had been that morning, before he went with JC to the studio.

* * *

Justin arrived to the Jive’s office building a little before ten, still feeling confused. Cameron had called him around nine to tell him that she was going to be on location for a week, but that she hoped he could join her as soon as he finished with his job. When Justin had tried to ask her why she had left without telling her, however, she had laughed at him.

“Silly, I told you about this months ago, remember? You’ve got to do something about your memory, Justin.” And she had sounded so sure that Justin hadn’t had the heart to correct her.

The feeling of uneasiness followed him all morning, but it wasn’t until he arrived to Jive when he could put a finger on what was wrong.

At the lobby, where they put all the album covers of the newest releases, he didn’t see the FutureSex/LoveSound cover. There was Keli, Outkast, Too Short, Pink’s and even JC’s album covers, but not his own. That was strange because they had pushed forward the date of his release and pushed back JC’s to give his friend time to polish the last songs. The ones he was producing.

Something weird was going on.

Johnny’s secretary let him in the office, while Justin was still wondering what was going on and thinking about calling JC. He was supposed to be at the studio at noon, and he wanted to check if that was still true.

“Justin, hi, I’m glad you could come,” Johnny ushered him on, inviting him to sit down. “Look, I know you’re still a little disappointed when we had to push back your release date, but I hope that you understand why we did it.”

“Wait, push back?” Justin shook his head. “We haven’t pushed back the date. We released it last week.”

“Justin, your first single will be released in November, why would we release the album now?” Johnny looked as confused as Justin, and Justin knew his manager. He was a very good manager, and a lousy actor, so it couldn’t be an elaborate joke. “Still, I was wondering if you and JC had finished the remixes you were working on?”

“We were planning on finishing it next week,” Justin answered, trying to convince himself that he hadn’t heard Johnny refer to the song as a remix, or in plural. “Unless you need it sooner?”

“Next week is fine, just please, remind JC that his tour begins in September,” Johnny smiled at him. “Now, I know you wanted to start the promotion work for your single, but I was wondering if you had some extra time to work with Chris.”

“With Chris?” Justin blinked. Chris wasn’t recording with Jive. Last he heard, Chris hadn’t a record deal yet. “Here?”

“Justin, are you feeling all right?” Johnny frowned again. Justin was starting to feel nauseated.

“I just, yeah,” Justin shook his head. Maybe he had underestimated Johnny’s acting abilities. His manager must be leading him on. “So, with Chris? If he’s all right with it, I think we can do something.”

“Perfect,” Johnny beamed. “I trust you have a copy of his album, but if not, you can ask my secretary for one. And Justin, I promise you, we’ll see your album out before the year ends.”

* * *

Justin closed his eyes, grabbing the wheel of his car at the Jive’s building’s parking lot. The meeting with Johnny had made no sense at all, and Johnny had been convinced that FutureSex hadn’t been released. And that Chris had released an album. Justin knew that was impossible because while he was almost ready to admit that maybe he had dreamed everything related to his album’s release –not that it was possible, but when the whole universe tells you you’re wrong, it was better to give it the benefit of doubt- Justin was sure he wouldn’t have forgotten if *Chris* had released an album.

He pulled out his cell phone, and dialed memory five, Chris’s phone.

If it was an elaborate joke on him, Chris would tell him. Chris was a lot of things, but he wasn’t **that** mean.

“’lo?” Chris wasn’t a bass either, and Justin blinked before answering.

“Lance? What are you doing with Chris’s phone?” He asked, more confused than before. He was sure that Lance was somewhere in L.A. that week.

“Justin, let’s not start **this** again, ok? Chris forgot his phone this morning, do you need anything?” Lance sounded tired, and Justin had to stop himself before asking ‘what’ again. Whatever ‘this’ was, it could wait.

“Johnny asked me to work with Chris on a couple of songs,” Justin said, carefully. Maybe Lance wasn’t aware of the cosmically complicated joke that was being played at Justin’s expense. Maybe Lance wouldn’t make fun of him.

“And you don’t want to? At JC’s party you offered to do that, didn’t you?” Lance was starting to sound **angrier** , which Justin definitively didn’t need. “Or have you changed your mind?”

“No, no, I still want to,” Justin hurried to say. Maybe it was not a joke. Maybe it was a weird dream like the one he had the night before. “I just wanted to check if he had time next week.”

“I think we’re going to Chicago next Friday to see Joey’s new play, but before that he’s free,” Lance answered, not missing a beat. That made Justin pause.

“Wait, ‘we’? Why are you staying with Chris?”

“Justin, I’m really not on the mood. Look, as soon as Chris comes back or calls because he needs his cell, I’ll tell him to call you. All right?”

“But, why would, I mean, what’s going on?”

“Bye, Justin.” And before Justin could put his ideas in a more coherent order, Lance hung up.

* * *

After a minor breakdown during which Justin seriously considered calling Lance again to find what the hell was wrong with his band mate, he decided to go to the only place where he could ignore the world for at least eight hours or until the world happened to make sense again, whichever happened first.

He had tried calling Joey on the way, but Joe’s phone had been disconnected. That was odd, but not as odd as having Lance answering Chris’s phone so Justin decided he could deal with that.

JC had been waiting for him at the studio entrance, and Justin thanked heaven because JC didn’t look any different from the day before. In fact, he looked exactly the same, down to the same pink shirt. Since JC wasn’t the type of going to sleep with his clothes on, that struck Justin as odd.

Still, he didn’t say anything until they were inside the recording booth and he realized he didn’t recognize any of the tracks they were supposed to be working on.

“I think I’m going insane, JC,” he said, softly, turning off the console. “Nothing makes sense today.”

“You and Cam had a fight?” JC asked, helpfully. Justin had to bite his lip to stop himself from answering that that would be better than what was going on.

“Lance and I had a fight. **Reality** and I had a fight.”

“I’m not surprised at the first, you and Lance haven’t been exactly friendly since Chris released Little Red Monster’s first album,” JC pointed out, and Justin knew that JC was trying to be helpful, but in reality he was making things worse. Justin could’ve sworn Chris’s band was called Nigels’ 11. “What did reality do to you?”

Justin sighed. If anyone could help him make some sense of his own head, it had to be JC. “I woke up convinced that FutureSex had already been released, and Chris hadn’t released any albums. And Lance was in L.A. with his boyfriend, not at Chris’s house.”

“If Lance wants to be with his boyfriend, he pretty much has to be at Chris’s house, Justin,” JC laughed at him, which made everything worse. “You know they’ve been dating for almost four years.”

Justin was glad he was sitting down, because if not he was sure his legs would’ve stopped working for him right that second. He couldn’t have heard JC right.

“Lance’s boyfriend is named Reichen,” he said, stubbornly. “Or something. Chris is, hell, Chris is not gay, JC. You know that, right?”

JC looked at him, with the intensity he reserved for complicated music sheets. “You’re serious,” he said, after a moment. “You really don’t remember Chris and Lance have been together since the Celebrity tour?”

Justin shook his head. If he was not dreaming –and if he pinched himself one more time he was going to break his skin- then it was really happening, and he had really gone insane. He didn’t know which possibility frightened him more.

“What did you do last night? It must have been one hell of a party to forget that.”

“After we left here?” Justin sighed. “I went home, spend a couple of hours flipping through our old photographs, had an acid flashback, threw up on the carpet, cleaned up and went to bed. When I woke up the world had gone insane.”

“Acid flashback?” JC was leaning over his chair, looking at him with obvious worry. “I thought you had stopped that long ago.”

“I did,” Justin shook his head. “I don’t know JC. I just, I don’t know. Maybe I hit my head or something I just can’t remember. So, Chris and Lance?”

“Chris and Lance,” JC nodded. “You do remember you’re with Cameron, right?”

“Yeah, that I remember,” Justin laughed. “And Joey is still with Kelly, right?”

“No, he married Britney last month.” JC said and Justin thought his heart would stop before JC started shaking with laughter.

“You ass,” Justin said, punching JC. “I almost believed you.”

“I know,” JC laughed even harder. “Look, it’s obvious you’re not up for doing anything right now. Why don’t you go back home and rest. We can finish this tomorrow, and still be on schedule.”

“You sure?” Justin didn’t want to sound selfish, but all he wanted was to crawl under his covers and hide for a week. Maybe then the world would be back to normal.

“Yeah, go on. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

* * *

Justin was sitting on top of the kitchen counter, debating with himself about the wisdom of having a beer or twelve, when the door bell rang.

He thought about not answering, wait until whoever that was behind the finger that was pounding the poor bell grew tired and left, because he really didn’t want to face another thing he didn’t remember. What if it was Britney out there? Or someone worse?

“Justin! Get the fuck up and answer the door or I’ll start doing a striptease for all your neighbors to see!”

Of course, Justin figured as he walked towards the door, it had to be Chris. The one person he really didn’t want to see, because if he saw him, Chris would confirm that everything was **real**. He really didn’t have an album out, Jive was pushing back his release date just as they had done with JC’s in the world Justin remembered, and Justin wasn’t considered one of the hottest talents around.

He had found that month’s GQ. The one in the cover had been Lance, talking about his two new productions, one for TV, one for cinema.

But he also knew that of all his friends, **Chris** would do a striptease if Justin didn’t open the door, so it was either open the door to his biggest fear, or risk the police coming out, arresting Chris, and then *Lance* would have a real reason to be angry at Justin. Definitively not a possibility that Justin wanted to explore.

“I’m going!” He answered, at the same time he reached the door and let it open. “Keep your shirt on, Chris!”

“You’ve got no idea what you’re missing, J,” Chris was standing at the door, but it took a second for Justin to recognize him.

For starters, Chris was thin. As thin as he had been during the No Strings Attached tour, and, judging by the defined muscles of his arms, he had been working out. He was still wearing the same old black t-shirts, and jeans that Justin had come to identify as Chris’s personal lack of style, but now they didn’t made him look like a slacker, or a man spending a lazy Sunday at home. He was wearing his hair long, with a black bandana covering part of it, another thing Justin recognized from the ‘old’ Chris, as well as the perennial silver necklace, but he was also wearing three hoops on his left ear, one in his right. Chris was also wearing black eyeliner.

“Are you going to let me in or you’re going to gape at me all night?” Chris asked, but more than irritated, he looked worried. “JC told me you were having some problems.”

“I… I’m sorry Chris. I just… When did you lose weight?” Justin said, before he could stop himself. Chris raised his eyebrow –his pierced eyebrow, now that Justin noticed the silver stud on it- and sighed.

“Justin, I haven’t lost weight since you saw me two weeks ago,” Chris sighed. “You’re really out of it, aren’t you?”

Justin just nodded and let Chris come in. Chris, with a lot more familiarity than what Justin had expected from his old friend, walked straight to the kitchen and pulled out a can of soda from the fridge. Justin really couldn’t remember if Chris had been at his house before, but it was obvious that he had.

“Have you been drinking?” Chris asked, worried. It was a little like back when *N Sync had started, when Chris paid attention to everything Justin did, let him be and do whatever he wanted, but always ready to catch him if he fell.

“No, I thought about it, but, well, maybe it’s not such a cool idea.”

Chris nodded, He really looked worried, and Justin couldn’t blame him. He was one step away from calling a hospital and commit himself.

“Let’s go to your living room,” Chris said, putting his arm around Justin’s shoulder. “And tell me everything that happened yesterday, ok?”

* * *

Three hours later, Chris seemed convinced that Justin had hit his head and couldn’t remember hitting his head. Justin, for his part, was glad to go with any theory that didn’t include calling him insane.

He hadn’t told Chris about his dream, because he didn’t thought it was important, but he went in detail through all the differences he could remember, Chris correcting him every time he got something wrong.

*N Sync’s hiatus was not official, for example, and they had actually performed together as a group a couple of times every year. They were only trying to figure out what to do next, how to really top Celebrity. In the meantime, they all were doing their own thing.

Lance wasn’t actually talking to Justin; and given the way Chris side-stepped the issue, Justin figured that that was what prevented them from getting together as a group, more than not knowing what to do next. If anything, between Justin, JC and Chris’s songs they would have more than enough for three more albums.

One hour later Justin was starting to believe the concussion theory, laughing at Chris’s jokes and trying hard to remember all the things he didn’t really know.

Justin couldn’t remember having so much fun since **his** mind’s version of the start of the hiatus.

“And so Lance said, let’s compromise Chris,” Chris was saying, imitating Lance’s voice. “You get off your ass and finish that album, and we come out like you want to.”

“And that’s how he finally got you to finish the songs?” Justin shook his head. In that other reality, which was looking more and more like a drunken dream now even if he still remembered it clearly, Chris hadn’t seemed to have a real direction with his life.

“No, he did that by promising mind blowing sex,” Chris deadpanned. “Coming out was just to go and make a deal with Jive.”

“I’m sure they loved the extra publicity,” Justin sipped his soda. He wasn’t touching alcohol that night. Then he noticed Chris’s frown. “What?”

“Justin, you **know** we didn’t do in purpose, right?” Chris said, much more serious than usual. “We told Johnny that they could push all our albums at the same time, hell, Lance still gets in long discussions about that, but Jive seems convinced that they can only do publicity for one *N Syncer at a time. I really never thought they would push back Justified, or that they would do so little to promote it.”

“I… I never blamed you, Chris,” Justin lied easily. He didn’t remember that happening, so technically, he didn’t blame Chris. “Or Lance. Or anyone, really.”

“I know,” Chris smiled at him, hitting him playfully with his elbow. “It’s just, you know how it was. You **did** say that we were just trying to get the media attention.”

“No, I didn’t.” Justin denied it immediately, but he guessed he was going to spend a lot of time being reminded of things he **hadn’t** done. Or maybe he would be lucky and next morning when he woke up, the world would make sense to him again.

“Actually, you said a couple of worse things,” Chris shrugged, as he got up from the couch. “But it’s all right, all forgotten. After all, I can’t be too mad at you; if wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have Lance with me now.”

“How come?” Justin frowned. He hadn’t even know Chris was interested in men before that day.

“Don’t you remember, at Challenge?” Chris laughed, going to the kitchen. “You must’ve been hjgh or something, but you **told** me Lance was gay. After the game you swore you hadn’t, but well, we all talked to Lance, he came out to us, and before you know it, we clicked. So in a way, it was thanks to you.”

* * *

When Chris left, Justin went and pulled out the photo album from its place again.

It couldn’t be, of course. **That** had been a dream. He **hadn’t** talked to Chris the night before in 2001 and told him Lance’s secret causing the world to change. It couldn’t be.

However, the picture from Challenge wasn’t the one he remembered. Sure, they looked the same, dressed the same.

But Justin could’ve sworn that before Chris was on the extreme left of the picture, not in the center, between Justin and Lance.

Worried, Justin started flipping the pages. Most of the pictures looked the same, but there were a few of them quite different. He was sure he would’ve noticed that Chris, more often than not, ended up next to Lance. The last pictures of the group all showed Chris standing next to Lance.

“This is crazy,” Justin murmured, flipping the pages back, to more familiar photos, photos that didn’t seem different from the ones in his memory. “I must be dreaming.”

He stopped at one of the photos from the 2001 Superbowl, just a few months before the Challenge of that year. He couldn’t remember that particular picture being taken, because it wasn’t the usual posed picture. Lance was saying something, Chris paying attention to him, while Joey seemed to be focused on the microphone in JC’s hands, JC was looking somewhere behind Chris, and he was with his back to the camera. They were backstage, he still wore his curls, and Joey had his blond highlights. Chris didn’t look as hardcore as he had looked a few minutes before, but with his denim jacket and black bandana he did sort of looked out of place among them.

Justin was about to flip the page when the world rippled **again**.

In the distance, he could hear the phone ringing.


	3. Just Want you to know

[   
](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/superbowl.jpg)

When the nausea finally subdued, Justin blinked trying to figure out where he was.

It took him some time to recognize the folded chairs behind him, the gray wall and the ‘do not pass this point’ signs.

He was backstage. And if the big footballs painted on the ground were a clue, he was at the Superbowl.

Justin pinched himself. It was not a dream. But if this wasn’t a dream, it meant that last time hadn’t been a dream either. He had really traveled to the past.

Justin sat on the ground for a moment, listening to Aerosmith, trying to figure out things.

If last time hadn’t been a dream, then he had caused the changes on reality. When he told Chris that Lance was gay, he somehow had made it possible for Chris and Lance to end up together, and destroyed his own life in the process.

Quickly, trying not to be noticed, Justin got on his feet and walked away from the stage where he could hear Aerosmith finishing Jaded. Soon, he would hear JC and Joey, and he really didn’t want to be around for that. Last time, meeting Chris had created the change. This time, Justin was not going to risk being seen by anyone in *N Sync.

He had two options. He could try and find the way to go back to that time where Lance and Chris were living together and his album kept being pushed back, or try to fix things. Fixing things sounded like a good idea, although a bit complicated. If he changed something here, then there was the slight possibility that Chris wouldn’t meet with him in the future, so he wouldn’t out Lance and Chris and Lance wouldn’t end up together.

That sounded like a good plan, except that he had no idea what to change.

He started walking away, checking his wallet. He had a couple hundred dollars and his credit card, which would be of no help if he stayed longer than last time. His account didn’t exist yet, so he couldn’t get money out of it. And one of his hundred had been printed in 2004, so that was no good either.

If he couldn’t find the way home before the day was over, he was going to be in deep trouble.

“There!” Justin froze as he saw Nick Carter and AJ McLean on the end of the aisle. Nick was pointing at him. “If you’re such an irresistible catch, I bet you a thousand dollars that you can’t seduce one of his bandmates!”

Justin barely had time to register Nick’s words before the world rippled around him again.

* * *

Justin opened his eyes and pushed his album away before starting do dry heave. There was nothing in his stomach to throw up, so this time, his carpet was spared.

Once he got the urge to vomit controlled, he drew a deep breath and looked at the album again. The picture of the Superbowl had changed. Chris wasn’t looking at them, he was looking somewhere outside the picture.

Panicking, Justin flipped the pages forward until he found the Challenge of the Children picture that had started it all.

At first sight, it looked as if it was back to normal, in the order that Justin remembered. Chris, himself, Joey, Lance, JC. It wasn’t until he focused on the still figure of Chris when he noticed the new change.

There was a sixty nine tattooed on Chris’s right wrist.

“Oh, boy,” he muttered, before passing out.

* * *

Justin woke up in his bed, feeling disoriented. Mostly, it was because he was sure he had gone to sleep on the couch, next to his photo albums, but there was also something different about his bedroom, something unfamiliar, that he couldn’t pinpoint. Until he opened the door he remembered went to a closet only to find his bathroom.

When he went down to have breakfast, he found again a note from Cameron, reminding him of the meeting at Jive, at ten. Justin frowned. He remembered the meeting of the day before, when he had managed to make Lance and Chris live a wonderful romance, and he didn’t want to think about what was expecting him now. Morosely, he turned on the radio, half expecting to hear the DJ say that Lance had a new album coming.

But the sound that filled his house wasn’t Lance’s voice, but his own, singing Sexy Back, and so, Justin relaxed.

Maybe he had managed to put things back to normal, Chris’s new tattoo non-withstanding. Maybe the tattoo and his house layout were the only changes.

Feeling a lot better with himself, he went upstairs to his newly discovered bathroom to take a shower.

* * *

Justin arrived to the Jive’s office building a little before ten, still feeling confused. Cameron had called him around nine to tell him that she was going to be on the recording studio for some work for Shrek III, and that she was going to be back home around midnight. Justin agreed to everything she said, although inside he was confused. It was one thing to travel back in time through photographs, another very different one was to relieve the same day three times.

It made sense in his head.

He went directly to Johnny’s office, not paying attention to the lobby at Jive. He didn’t want to see the album covers, didn’t want to entertain the idea that maybe something else was wrong besides his tendency to repeat a meeting daily and Cameron changing jobs every time he woke up.

Johnny’s secretary let him in the office, and Justin almost fainted when instead of the tall black man he was met by the icy stare of Theresa Rourke, his former PR agent.

“Justin, hi, I’m glad to see you’re on time,” Theresa called him in, pointing to a chair for him to sit down. “Look, I know you’ve been working with JC for his new cd, but we’re late in our schedule with your album, so do you think you can hurry the studio work? We need that new single now if we want to release it in November.”

“Wait, November? First single?” Justin shook his head, confused. “Theresa, I just heard Sexy Back on the radio. That was the first single.”

“Justin, dear, Sexy Back was the first single of your last album. The one we released last year,” Theresa explained really slowly. “You promised me that this time we would get the new album on time for Christmas shopping. Do you have a title yet?”

“Not… really,” Justin stammered. He had no idea what was going on. He could deal with a delayed album. A new album, was too much. “I haven’t had the time to go through the possible ones.”

“Well, don’t delay it anymore. I don’t want another No Strings Attached in our hands,” Theresa smile was cold. “And while we’re at it, I hope you finish your work with JC as soon as possible. His album is delayed and I don’t want to push it to next year.”

“Sure thing,” Justin managed to say, sounding normal. “Next week at the worst. Anything else? Chris needs help?”

“Justin, are you feeling all right?” Theresa frowned. “You haven’t asked about Chris since… I think three years ago. You know he’s not with Jive.”

“I just, yeah,” Justin shook his head. So Chris didn’t have an album out yet, which was perfectly normal. There would be no eye-liner wearing Chris in this timeline. “Just thinking of calling the guys.”

“I’d like it better if you stopped drinking before coming to our meetings,” Theresa pointed out. “Now go. I have another meeting and you have some producing work to finish.”

* * *

Justin closed his eyes, grabbing the wheel of his car at the Jive’s building’s parking lot. Seeing Theresa instead of Johnny had been unnerving. After he left her office, he checked the directory to find that she was the new president of the company, his manager, JC’s manager and Nick Carter’s manager.

He didn’t find the Backstreet Boys’s name on the company current directory.

Justin shook his head. One thing was to fuck up his own career –and he really had to go home and find his notes for a third album he didn’t remember- but if he had somehow managed to make the Backstreet Boys disappear before their last album, it would’ve been bad. He liked Never Gone.

He pulled out his cell phone, and dialed memory five, Chris’s phone.

Last time, calling Chris had been the best way to find out what was going on. Justin hoped this time it wouldn’t be an exception.

“Hello?” Only that Chris didn’t answer the phone this time either.

“Nick? What are you doing with Chris’s phone?” He asked, more confused than before. One thing was having one of his group answering Chris’s phone, but having Nick Carter on the other side of the line was just unnerving. Justin closed his eyes and wished that it didn’t mean the same thing as it had meant last time.

“Justin, you called my phone,” Nick’s voice sounded tired. “And I have no idea where Chris is, and I’m sure he doesn’t want to see you.”

“What do you mean, he’s not going to see me?” Justin frowned to the phone. This timeline was a lot weirder than the one before.

“He and AJ had another fight, and Chris is not going to be on the mood to hear you telling him ‘I told you so’, so fuck off, will you?” Nick explained carefully, whispering.

“Nick…”

“Justin, please!” This time Nick sounded angry, even when he kept whispering, as if he didn’t want AJ to listen. “You haven’t talked to Chris in years, you never cared about AJ, so if you want to be a friend, just fuck off and get lost again.”

“I…” Justin stopped, trying to think fast. Things were really weird in this timeline. “I’m sorry, ok. Whatever I said, I’m sorry. Just tell Chris I’m looking for him, please.”

“I won’t,” Nick’s tone was positively freezing as he hung up the phone.

* * *

Figuring that there was nothing to be gained punching numbers at random, and since his cell phone memory’s listing wasn’t the same as it was before, Justin decided to keep the schedule he remembered. If nothing else, JC could have some good advice, just like last time.

JC had been waiting for him at the studio entrance, and Justin sighed. JC looked the same as the day before. Same short hair, same pink shirt. It was the same day as before, apparently.

“JC, we need to talk,” he said, not even bothering to turn on the equipment. JC sighed sadly.

“This is when you tell me that after all, we can’t still be friends?” JC asked. “Because you know that’s not true. I forgave you. If you give them time, Joey, Lance and Chris will forgive you too.”

“What did I do this time?” Justin groaned. Last time it had been him not supporting Lance’s and Chris’s relationship. He couldn’t begin to guess why this time everyone hated him.

“What do you mean?” JC frowned. Apparently, the talk wasn’t following the right script for either of them.

“Look, C, I know I’m going to sound insane, but please, listen to me,” Justin let out a deep breath. “I think I’ve been traveling in time and changing our present accidentally.”

JC didn’t even blink at that, encouraging Justin to continue.

“Yesterday I woke up to find that Lance and Chris were living together, Chris had two albums out, I had only one, and everyone thought Lance was the golden guy in Hollywood or something. Today? I have no idea what’s going on today. And before the Lance and Chris love fest? It was normal. Lance was with his boyfriend, my second album had been released, we were friends. I’m going crazy.”

“It couldn’t have been normal if Lance had a boyfriend,” JC pointed out. “You know he got married last year.”

“Please tell me gay marriage is allowed here,” Justin closed his eyes. He could live with being more famous, and he could live with Nick Carter hating him –-he was not going to think about the possibility of Chris and AJ being together. But Lance had been happy with Reichen, happier than Justin had ever seen him. And Justin suspected it was not just because they were happy and in love, but because Lance was finally being true to himself. If he had destroyed that, he really had to find the way to fix it.

“Lance is not gay, at least not that we know.” JC shook his head and Justin couldn’t help but feel that he was missing something important there. “How do you know you’re time traveling?”

“You believe me?” Justin raised his eyebrow. He thought it would take a little more to convince JC that he was telling the truth.

“It sounds like a good story,” JC shrugged. “I wish I could travel back in time, sometimes.”

Justin sighed. JC was humoring him, and Justin couldn’t blame him. If things had been reversed, he wouldn’t believe his story either.

“It’s a pain in the ass,” Justin grumbled. “I keep changing everything! My career, your career, *N Sync! And I have no idea what I did!”

“Well, if you happen to travel back again?” JC offered his advice, smiling. “Do not touch anything. That’s the safest bet.”

* * *

Justin decided that this time, before going home, he was going to get to the bottom of the problem. JC had told him a bit about the differences between what he remembered, and what had happened, and Justin definitively didn’t like them.

*N Sync had separated right after the United We Stand concert, and it had been Justin’s idea. Apparently, Justin had yelled at Chris about Chris’s desire to come out, and things had gone downhill from there. Justin hoped his alternate self had freaked over Chris dating AJ McLean, and not over Chris being bi.

It explained why Lance was still in the closet, though.

His first stop was Nick’s house that was thankfully still where he remembered. Nick had to know the whole story, because JC didn’t.

Thanks to his alternate self’s outburst, Chris didn’t talk about his boyfriend to the others. The only thing JC knew was that AJ had left the Backstreet Boys shortly after that, and was theoretically part of Chris’s band.

“What the fuck are you doing here? I told you not to come,” Nick didn’t let him in. He just yelled at him through the outer door’s interphone.

“Nick, I just need to ask AJ one thing and I’ll leave you alone,” Justin pleaded. He hated pleading, but unless he had his answer, he couldn’t leave. “Well, two things.”

“AJ is asleep right now.” Nick’s voice sounded tired. “Ask me if you want.”

Justin passed his hand through his hair, frustrated. He wanted to see AJ, he wanted to see how much he had fucked things up. AJ hadn’t been a close friend, but he was a friend. Justin remembered quite well how much he had changed after rehab.

After rehab. There was something there that Justin was forgetting, but he had no time to try and remember it.

“Why did AJ and Chris started dating?” He finally asked, deciding that it was better to go straight to the point since Nick wasn’t going to open the door. Both times he had changed time, Chris had ended up gay. The first time, Justin could admit it had something to do with him telling Chris that Lance was gay. This time, he wasn’t sure how his traveling could have affected Chris this way. He hadn’t even *seen* Chris.

“Why do you want to know?” Nick practically growled. “You and Kevin made your feelings on the subject quite clear four years ago.”

Justin’s mind was racing. Chris hadn’t seen him, not this time since he was performing. But AJ had. Nick and AJ had seen him, just before he was hurled back to this present.

“Nick… did it had anything to do with the stupid bet you made with him back at the Superbowl?” Justin guessed. It was a wild guess, and he hoped he was wrong. But as long as it was a possibility, he had to know.

Nick didn’t answer, but the door finally opened so Justin drove to the entrance, wondering exactly what he had done.

“How did you know about that?” Nick asked, coming down the steps of the main door. Justin had to brace himself not to flinch. Nick looked bigger than what he remembered. Maybe it was just that he seemed as if he had been working out non stop for four, five years, but he looked intimidating. “Did you tell Chris anything about it?”

“I haven’t seen Chris in a long time,” Justin answered. It was sort of true. He hadn’t seen this Chris, and the last Chris he had seen wasn’t the one Nick knew. “And I’m not going to tell him that his boyfriend seduced him for a bet. I just wanted to know.”

Nick seemed to deflate hearing Justin, because he sighed, leaning against the car. “You didn’t? Hell, I, shit. I’m sorry then. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“Nick, what happened?”

“Chris found out, I think, AJ hasn’t been exactly forthcoming,” Nick shook his head. “I think AJ told him, and doesn’t remember he did.”

Justin nodded, shocked. He didn’t need to ask, but it looked as if AJ had never been in rehab this time around. Which sucked, because it meant that just by being there, Justin had managed to seriously fuck up his group and the Backstreet Boys’ lives.

“Do you know where Chris is?” Justin asked, trying to calm himself down. If Chris had just recently found out that his partner of at least three years had been toying with him? He was going to need a friend.

“Why do you want to know? I thought you didn’t want anything to do with them,” Nick asked, narrowing his eyes. Justin shook his head.

“Look, I was an idiot, all right? I want… no, I need to make amends with him. Can you tell me where Chris is?”

“Last time he and AJ fought, he went to Joey’s,” Nick told him. “But I swear, Justin, if you make this worse, I’ll personally will kick your ass.”

Justin nodded. “Trust me Nick- if I make it worse, I’ll kick my own ass.”

* * *

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Justin flinched upon seeing Chris’s angry face. He had seen Chris angry before, just not this angry, and never at him. Whatever his alternate self had said and done, it was obviously worse than what he had suspected.

The funny thing was that Chris didn’t look very different from his Chris, the one he remembered. He was still wearing his hair long, he was still wearing a bandana. The main difference was that there were a lot more tattoos visible under his t-shirt.

“I came to apologize,” Justin said quickly. It couldn’t hurt, really. If he didn’t found the way to trigger a new trip to the past, he at least could try and salvage his friendship with Chris. Even if it took him years of groveling, he guessed it was worth a shot.

“A little too late, don’t you think?” Chris’s eyes narrowed as he closed the door behind on Justin’s face.

Justin realized that he had really fucked things up.

* * *

Justin drove as fast as he could to his house and pulled out the photo album from its place again.

It had to be the album. It was the only logical explanation. He had to find a way to go back, and stop himself from being seen by AJ and Nick. He opened the album quickly to the Superbowl picture and stared.

Nothing happened.

He focused on the picture, willing the ripple to come, but nothing happened. That particular door seemed to be closed.

Frustrated, Justin sighed, and flipped the pages back. Maybe he couldn’t go back to the same point in time, since he had already changed it. Which meant he needed to find a new door.

In the page opposite to the Superbowl picture, he found the Billboard awards one. He remembered that one, when wardrobe had almost had a heart attack thanks to JC’s pants, and Kathie Griffin had handcuffed herself to him. In the picture, they were smiling at the camera, JC’s hand on Chris’s shoulder, all of them holding their statues except for JC. It had been a good night and Justin couldn’t imagine that, thanks to his stupidity, in less than a year they wouldn’t be even talking to each other.

Suddenly, the award that Justin was holding flashed, and the world around him rippled.

Justin couldn’t help but feel grateful.

In the distance, his phone was ringing again.


	4. All day long I think about sex

  
[   
](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/trickc.jpg)

Justin blinked, trying to get a grip on his surroundings.

Just as he expected, he could see the back of the stage of the Billboard awards, and he cursed inwardly. This time, there was no way he could pass for his younger self, and if anyone saw him, he would get thrown out.

Briefly, he remembered JC’s words.

“If you travel to the past, do not touch anything!”

Easy for him to say, Justin guessed. Now that he was there, he had to find the way to solve the mess he had created.

Trying to figure things out, he took a step back, not noticing the table behind him until he bumped it and heard the distinctive sound of glass shattering.

“Shit!” he yelled, just as the world around him started to ripple “Wait! It’s not fair! I didn’t do anything!”

* * *

Justin barely had time to register that he was not in his living room and his photo album was not in his hands before he fell to the floor.

The ground was moving.

And it wasn’t the movement of an earthquake, even when he was pretty sure they didn’t get earthquakes in Florida, it was a rhythmic movement he knew well.

He was on a bus.

“Oh, boy,” He muttered, and closed his eyes.

* * *

Justin woke up, feeling disoriented. He was on a bunk bed, on a bus, and he had no idea how he had gotten there. He remembered the time traveling, because it was one of those things one didn’t forget no matter what, but he couldn’t figure out how the fact that he had broken something in the Billboard Awards ended up with him in a tour bus.

He got down, trying to think. The last two times, it had been easy to find out what had happened. If he was in the middle of the highway, it wasn’t going to be that simple. The good news was that he wasn’t going to have to deal with yet another meeting at Jive.

He scratched his head, still half asleep when he heard the quiet laughter coming from the kitchenette. He wasn’t alone on the bus.

Trying not to look spooked, he walked towards the laugh to find Joey and Lance, cheerfully sharing breakfast.

“Look who’s up!” Joey greeted. “It’s your turn to wash the dishes then.”

“The dishes?” Justin asked, taking in the differences of his friends. Joey looked as big as always, with a gray t-shirt that was a bit frayed on the ends. His hair was dyed blonde again. Lance’s hair wasn’t as short as he remembered, and was wet, probably from a recent shower.

“It’s the deal,” Lance smirked. “Last one to wake up does the dishes. You remember that, right? It was your idea.”

“Sure,” Justin muttered, wondering exactly how he was going to figure out what was going on without convincing his friends that he was crazy.

* * *

The buses stopped just a little after ten, and Justin was still clueless about what was going on. He knew they were on tour, that *N Sync was still together, Lance was out of the closet –something he learned when Lance answered his cell phone by saying ‘Hey, Reichen, love. I was thinking about you’- but Joey and Kelly hadn’t married. They still lived together, whenever Joey wasn’t on the road, but there had been no wedding.

But important questions like what tour it was, when was the next concert, and what was he supposed to sing, were the questions he couldn’t ask.

His only consolation was that this time, there was not going to be a meeting at Jive.

“Group meeting!” Justin’s relief was short lived when JC entered the bus, followed by Chris, who was the one yelling at the top of his lungs. It wasn’t hard to see the changes in both his friends. JC was wearing his hair just as he had done while releasing Schizophrenic, slightly longer than usual, but his sense of fashion was as impossible as always, and he was still wearing the pink shirt that Justin had already seen four days in a row. Still, it was hard not to notice that he wasn’t wearing his Leo necklace. In its place, he was wearing a silver collar that Justin remembered seeing a lot of times around Chris’s neck. Chris, on the other hand, was wearing his hair long and covered by a bandana just as Justin remembered him doing in his *original* timeline. Chris was also wearing a black fumanskeeto tank top and a wrist bracelet near his left elbow, a quirk that Justin had never really understood. Around his neck, Chris wore the Leo necklace.

Shit.

It didn’t take a genius to realize that Chris and JC were together this time. Justin knew his best friend. JC wouldn’t take off his necklace just for a prank. And Chris looked **happy**. As happy as he had looked with Dani… or, now that Justin thought about it, with Lance.

“I didn’t know we had a group meeting scheduled for today,” Lance said with an amused smile. “Wasn’t that for tomorrow?”

“We decided to change it,” JC explained, sitting down. Chris sat next to him, laying his head on JC’s lap. Justin tried mightily not to look shocked. He was guessing the arrangement was sort of common on the bus given that neither Joey nor Lance commented on it. “Since tomorrow Joey’s not going to be with us.”

“Guys, you know Kelly is flying to meet us in Chicago, I haven’t seen her in weeks,” Joey explained, shaking his head. “I told you that yesterday. She and Brianna are coming.”

“Which is exactly why we’re having the meeting today,” Chris said with a smile. “So you can actually relax with your family before the concert.”

“We have a concert tomorrow?” Justin couldn’t help it. He was panicking. One thing was to bluff his way out of a recording session. Another very different was to sing and dance for two hours when he had no idea of the **song set** , let alone the choreography.

He doubted that in five years they had kept _I want you back_ , _It’s gonna be me_ or _Bye Bye Bye_.

Perhaps _Bye Bye Bye._ It made a good ending to a show.

“Sure we do,” Chris looked at him, amused. “You know, they pay us for this. I know, it’s a crazy idea, but after ten years, they seem to think it works.”

“Don’t tease him, Chris,” JC scolded. “You tend to forget our interview dates, so you have no room to talk.”

“You forget **one** interview, and of course, your boyfriend never lets you forget,” Chris rolled his eyes, sitting up. “Seriously, J. You have never forgotten a concert before. What’s wrong?”

Justin gulped. He was good at telling lies, he knew that. However, it was hard to tell a lie when he wasn’t sure of what to say. It was different when the only thing he could say was ‘sorry, but in the last timeline I woke up in, we weren’t even together as a group’, and he was pretty sure that was not going to be a good answer. Even if JC had listened to him last time, there was no way in which Justin could tell him anything now. Not if this time, JC had ended up being Chris’s lover.

“I just… I think I’m still half asleep,” he finally answered, lamely. “What were we going to talk about today?”

Chris narrowed his eyes, looking suspicious. Justin gulped, but managed to keep his poker face. He just had to fool the guys long enough to figure out what to do.

“The same thing as the last two meetings,” Lance laughed. “Namely, what will be the song set for our next album.”

“We’re doing some advance.” Joey stretched his arms, and Justin could see the shadow of a new tattoo, barely showing under Joey’s shirt. “We’re down to what? Twenty?”

“Twenty one,” Chris corrected. “We could make it a double album.”

“Johnny won’t let us do another double album,” Lance shook his head. “So what do we do? Put the names out of a hat?”

“We could always think of what would look good for the next tour,” JC said. “I don’t know about you guys, but I think we could leave _Bye Bye Bye_ out then. It’s been almost seven years, the joke is growing old.”

“You’re forgetting our manager, C,” Chris interrupted, smiling. “He wants us to keep one of the old songs on the set. If we take out _Bye Bye Bye_ , we might as well say we want to do _Tearin’ Up My Heart_ again.”

Justin listened to his bandmates arguing, and he realized that, deep down, he had missed it. While he enjoyed being the one in charge, being the one who made the decisions without any external input, he had missed the easy way in which they used to start meetings. It hadn’t been until the last year he remembered when things had gone sour. When he had been more worried about his solo album, and Joey could only talk about Brianna, and Chris had started retreating into his own world.

Apparently, that hadn’t happen here. Their meetings had never become virtual battles, ending with more yells than words.

He could get used to it, he realized, and smiled. Trying to be casual, he reached for the copy of the songs’ titles that Lance had pulled out after telling Joey that no, a remix of Giddy Up was a bad idea. He still didn’t know how the new songs sounded, how *N Sync’s sound had evolved after five more years, but he figured that the titles could give him some idea of what to say.

The first title was a familiar one, and Justin smiled. He could work with what fate was throwing at him.

 _Sexy Back._

If he was still writing, he could learn to like this timeline.

* * *

Justin wasn’t that sure of himself by the time the meeting ended and Chris and JC left to their own bus, apparently, to talk about arrangements.

They didn’t ask Justin to join in, and neither Lance or Joey commented on it. Justin realized that it was a common thing. Just like in his time, when it was him and JC the ones who would talk about what they could do with the songs, ignoring everyone else.

“They’re probably going to end up having sex,” Joey told him when Justin half commented that he wanted to talk to them about a couple of remixes. “So unless you decided that you’re not really that freaked out about it, I wouldn’t recommend going to their bus.”

Since the image of Chris having sex with JC was not one he wanted to explore, Justin dropped the subject. There was nothing more to do, except figuring out how he was going to learn five years worth of new choreography and solos in less than seven hours.

Justin was trying to figure out what to do when his cell phone started ringing. Without really thinking, he answered it without looking at the name on the screen. The tone was his own melody for _Sexy Back_ , so he figured it was Cameron.

“What’s up, babe?”

“Justin, I’m so sorry, I won’t be able to meet you in Chicago.” The voice on the other side of the line didn’t sound like Cameron at all. Unfortunately for Justin, it wasn’t an unknown voice either.

“Brit?”

“Do you call anyone else ‘Babe’ on your cellphone, J?” Britney didn’t sound mad, which was a good thing he guessed. It didn’t help the sinking feeling in his stomach though.

“Only you?” He half asked, trying to go along. If he was dating Britney, things would be a lot harder. While he had managed to mend their friendship, the fact that she had cheated on him had never stopped hurting.

“I hope so,” she answered, her voice clearly laughing. “Anyway, I was telling you, I won’t be making it to Chicago, since we’re having a bit of a problem with the new video, so, what do you say if I fly to whenever you’re going after Chicago? I have two weeks free, and, well, even with the group concerts, we could have a second honey moon, what do you say?”

* * *

Justin came back to himself to see the very worried face of JC looking down at him. He blinked, trying to clear his memories.

“Man, I had the most awful nightmare ever,” He muttered, sitting up. Only then he realized he was on a bunk bed of a tour bus. The nightmare wasn’t over, apparently.

“You scared Britney half to death, Justin,” JC said, giving him a wet cloth for his head. “Us too, by the way. You just fainted, what happened?”

“Britney cheated on me,” Justin said, slowly. “She cheated on me, we broke up and then she got married and had two babies.”

JC frowned, puzzled. In the **right** timeline, JC had been the first to know about Britney’s fling. “She did all that since you saw her, just yesterday? How did she manage to hide two pregnancies from the press?”

“No, not **now** ,” Justin kept going before realizing he really couldn’t explain things to JC. “In my nightmare. She cheated on me in my nightmare. When I fainted. It was… too real.”

“Well, J, you’ve always been a little too jealous of her friends,” JC pointed out. “Maybe the heat got to you, and when she said she couldn’t come to Chicago… it shorted you out?”

Justin nodded, not trusting his voice.

“You ok? We’re about to get to the hotel, and you can sleep there for a couple of hours. We have an interview at nine, but afterwards, you can rest.”

“I just need, look JC, this is going to sound weird,” Justin gathered his courage. Of everyone in the group, JC was the only one who was not going to laugh. “But I can’t remember a single song after the Celebrity album. Or the choreographies. Or our song set for tomorrow’s show.”

JC didn’t even blink. In fact, he smiled.

“That was why you panicked at the meeting?” JC shook his head. “J, you have to stop drinking whatever Chris offers you. I love him, but he was never meant to be a barman. Just rest, it will come to you.”

“What if it doesn’t?” Justin was seriously worried about that. None of his jumps had come with the memories included.

“Well, I got copies of the cds in our bus, and we have four concerts taped because Steve wants to make this DVD a special one, not just a recording of the show, so I could lend them to you when we get to the hotel,” JC said, although Justin could tell that his friend was not very amused at the possibility. No one took their music more seriously than JC. “And if nothing works, I wake you up tomorrow at four and we spend the whole day teaching you the show.”

* * *

Justin sat on his room bed, still wondering what to do after seeing the video of their latest concert. He had an easier way out if he didn’t want to try performing, and he knew it. He could just find one picture, one single picture of before, and he would be in another reality where he wasn’t pressed by time.

But that would mean screwing **again** with his friend’s lives. And here Chris was happy, JC was happy, and Lance was happy. After the last reality, Justin wasn’t sure he could guarantee that would happen again.

Sure, he was **married** to **Britney** , and he still didn’t know what freaked him out the most: the marriage part or the fact that it was Britney. But as far as he knew, they were still on the top of the world.

Deep down he knew he had no right to mess up with that.

The concert had been different. Justin knew that it didn’t matter if he left this reality, even so he would never forget the bizarre sight of the five of them singing _All day Long I think About Sex_ without back up dancers. He guessed he was lucky. With three gay members in a group of five, there could’ve been male dancers instead.

Besides that, it had been an interesting two hours. The choreography was a lot more subdued than what Justin remembered, which was perfect in his opinion. That meant he could learn them faster. They still used pyrotechnics, and lasers and gag videos. And they had kept not only _Bye Bye Bye_ , but also a small reprise of _God Must Have Spent_ and _Celebrity_. Besides from _All Day Long_ , he also recognized _Rock your Body_ and _Who Am I_. The rest of the songs were completely new to him.

But he knew that even that is not going to be a problem as big as trying to learn the choreography. Because for the first time since the first *N Sync’s concerts, he is not up and center the whole concert. They all are. It’s a *group* concert, and Justin wondered exactly how much the group had changed because Chris and JC were together. Joey had solos, **Lance** had solos. They sounded incredibly different from what Justin remembered. Not bad, but not something he was expecting to hear.

By the time Chris came to knock on his door to tell him they have an interview and he has to be down at the lobby in five minutes and that he doesn’t care if Justin is naked because they weren’t going to be late, Justin still didn’t have an answer to his question.

Did he stay there, where everyone but he was happy, or he destroyed this reality in the off chance that the next one would be better for him?

* * *

Their interview for that day was at a local radio station, so Justin didn’t have the luxury of a couple of minutes before make-up as he hoped. He now knew a bit more than in the morning, at least now he knew that their latest album was called “ _Burning_ ” and that their tour was the “ _Tied Up_ ” tour. And that was about it. He didn’t even know what was going on with his own life.

“Guys, I don’t think I’m ready for this,” he muttered, as the station manager led them to their seats. “I’m pretty sure I’m not.”

“Don’t worry, J. We’ll take care of it,” JC smiled at him. He had changed clothes and now was wearing a white tank-top with strange words hand-written with puffy sparkly paint. It looked like the one JC had wore during the Pop Odyssey tour, only that this one was handmade and the words were absolute gibberish. In fact, now that Justin watched it closely, it was just one word. Tricks, only misspelled, with a c instead of an s.

Only JC would wear a misspelled shirt.

Still, Justin couldn’t avoid the sinking feeling on his stomach as the show began and the DJ made the introductions. There wasn’t a single question he felt he could answer. And the DJ would focus on him, they always did. Ask him about solo projects, new singles, his romance with Britney –which had become quite annoying in the last years, because they questioned him about her marriage, and her kids, as if he was supposed to know anything.

Now he couldn’t even answer his opinion about Lance’s coming out because he didn’t know when Lance had come out. He didn’t even question the publicity of JC and Chris’s relationship because he had seen them kiss, briefly and with the same sweetness that Justin used to have with Cameron, out and in plain view.

To be truthful, he felt a little disappointed that he had missed **that** development. He had just appeared when things already worked, and for a moment, he sincerely wished he could remember **how** JC and Chris had come to realize that they worked together.

It still came out as a surprise when the first question the DJ asked was aimed at Chris.

“So, Chris, did you ever expected *N Sync to last this long?”

“Sure I did!” Chris answered, casually leaning on JC. “There were a few rough patches, especially after _Celebrity_ , but we’re friends so, I see us together for a long, long time.”

“It’s been two years since you and JC decided to make your relationship public knowledge, has anything changed for you because of that?”

Justin was genuinely curious about what Chris would say, but it was JC the one who picked up the question.

“We were really worried about that,” JC started saying. “Our management was livid, since we hadn’t run it past them. It was time to do it though, and it isn’t as if what someone does in private should be anybody’s business. Fans surprised us, though.”

“Our fans have always been very supportive,” Lance piped in. “Last year, they put an ad on Billboard to mark our ten years together as a group.”

“We saw that,” the DJ agreed. “So it hasn’t hurt your sales at all?”

“We do get the occasional hate mail,” Chris shook his head. “And once we had a group protesting outside one of our concerts, but we still don’t know if it was because of JC and me, or because of JC’s lyrics.”

“There have been some questions about that. How do you felt when All Day Long was pulled from the airwaves?”

“A little disappointed,” JC nodded. “Of course, I still think it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t had that mishap with Janet at the Superbowl.”

“That was an honest accident!” Justin couldn’t stop himself. He had had more than enough grief regarding that incident in his own timeline, he really didn’t want to go back and rehearse it again. “I had no idea those things came off!”

“Because Britney never wears outfits like that,” Chris joked, earning a laugh from everyone around. Unfortunately for Justin, his outburst brought the attention of the DJ back to him.

“Speaking of Britney, it’s been six months since you two tied the knot. How’s the life of the married man treating Justin Timberlake?”

Justin opened his mouth, closed it again. How could he answer that question when in his mind he wasn’t even married? When he couldn’t stop thinking that Britney had cheated on him?

“I still can’t believe it happened,” he finally said, hoping that he sounded lovestruck and not just dumbstruck. “It’s like… I keep thinking Brit married someone else.”

* * *

“You’re in deep shit, man,” Joey said, on the way back to the hotel. “If Britney listened to that interview, she’s going to have your balls for dinner.”

“I just said the truth, I’m still shell shocked from the wedding,” Justin answered, smiling. He had come to a decision. This timeline wasn’t so bad. His friends were happy, he was still famous. Maybe he was no longer the most important part of *N Sync, but he still was **Justin Timberlake**. He could work with it.

Besides, he was pretty sure that going back to **his** original timeline was going to be too complicated. If the worst came to happen, he could always divorce Britney. They had already lasted six months, which was a lot better than Britney’s first marriage in his timeline.

They were reaching the hotel when Joey’s cell rang. Justin looked at him smile when he saw the name on the screen, flipping it open.

“Hey, Kel. You’re in Chicago?” Joey’s smile crumpled fast, his skin taking a ghostly white. “Yes. This is Joey Fatone. Are you… Are you sure? But… Yes, she’s my girlfriend, Kelly Baldwin. Wait. Please. She was traveling with our daughter, Briahna Fatone. She’s just… No, no. No, please. Don’t…”

Joey started sobbing, while everyone else looked at him in horror. Lance was the first to react, taking the cell away from Joey’s hands.

“This is Lance Bass, could you please repeat me what you just told Joey?” Lance asked to the phone, and Justin saw his mouth tighten. “I see. Outside the city? And you’re sure there are no survivors? I see. Look, I understand that you’re just doing your job, but…”

Justin blacked out Lance’s words, focused on Joey, who was still sobbing and muttering on the back of the limo. Chris had moved to his side, hugging him. From what Joey was saying, Justin could make the words ‘plane accident’.

Shit.

* * *

It took Justin one hour to decide what he was going to do, and half an hour to find what he needed.

There was nothing to think, really. He could go back, and make sure Kelly and Briahna weren’t on that plane to Chicago that night. The others would agree, if he could tell them what he was planning. He just had to be careful not to change anything else. *N Sync together, JC and Chris together, it worked, it worked even better than Lance and Chris together – and he would only admit to himself that the reason why it was better was because when Lance and Chris had been together, his own career was stalled – so if he managed to just change how Kelly and Joey lived, he could keep the best of this timeline.

And Kelly and Briahna.

He even had the plan. The only reason why the girls had died had been because they hadn’t been on the tour with them. He just needed to convince Joey to make Kelly come with them all the time. It was easy.

The hard part of the plan was finding a picture close enough in time to the Billboard awards of 2000 so he could jump, but not jump far enough to ruin JC and Chris’s chance to be together. So he had gone and bought every single music magazine he could find, flipping through the pictures trying not to focus in any one until he found the one he was looking for. Thankfully, all the magazines repeated old pictures in articles about them, so he knew it was just a matter of time.

Regretfully, he saw the pictures where Chris was hugging JC, seeing a fast forward map of **their** relationship. There was a risk he would be destroying that, and he knew it. But he decided that if whenever he ended up, Chris and JC **weren’t** together, he would find the way to get them together.

When he found the old, small picture of the Planet Hollywood party back in 2000, he smiled. It was just a month before the Billboard awards, and nothing much could happen in a month that could change Chris and JC’s romantic life. He hoped. Still, he concentrated in the image before him, Lance with his green jacket, JC smiling, still looking somewhat **normal** in white. Chris, next to him with his Pittsburg’ Steelers’s cap, looking sideways at JC, Joey behind him looking at something the others hadn’t spotted, his hand on Justin’s own shoulder. Justin had been grimacing, he didn’t remember why, in a yellow-brown jacket. They had been tired then, Justin could see even if he didn’t remember, and he was concentrating on Chris’s silver hoops when the picture, thankfully, rippled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, the TrickC shirt was milosflaca’s idea. It was originally a shirt with all the pairings, but I changed it a little for this. Isn’t it cute, though?


	5. I've got you

[ ](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/group3715.jpg)

  
Justin shook his head before trying to figure out where he was. It looked like the back alley to the Planet Hollywood, and he could see the flash lights and the photographers pass before him.

He had to be careful; he didn’t want to be seen before he could put his plan in progress. He knew that talking to Joey was useless. Joey wouldn’t listen to someone who *looked* like an older Justin Timberlake, especially not about saving a baby who wouldn’t be born until March, the next year. This Joey still wasn’t a father.

And if he tried to talk with Joey, and any of the others saw him, he would be back to square one. No, he had to remain hidden and thank the stars his *voice* hadn’t changed that much, and that he had never changed his cell phone number, and that he had Nick’s number on speed dial, the last one in his cell memory.

“If you have this number, you know who this is. Leave a message, I’ll get back to you.” Nick’s monotonous voice said, sounding a lot younger than Justin cared to remember said. It was the answering machine that Justin had been counting on getting.

“Nick? This is Justin. Look, I’m maybe a little drunk, but I think you guys could help Joey out, you know? With the baby and all, maybe Brian could give him some advice, keep the family together and all that shit. Call me, right? Just don’t feel insulted if I don’t actually remember this phone call.”

He hung up quickly, waiting for the familiar nauseating feeling, but it didn’t come. Puzzled, he looked at his phone.

“Why am I not jumping back?” he asked to the LDS screen. “I called Nick! That’s different! Why am I still here?”

But as he finished the question the world around him rippled once again. As it happened, he guessed the ripple had waited until Nick called his younger self.

Justin had time to smile. His plan was in motion.

* * *

Justin smiled when the floor didn’t move under his feet. He was back at his house, not on a tourbus.

That was a bit unexpected, but he could work with that. Even if they were no longer a group, as long as Chris and JC were together, and Kelly and Briahna alive, he could work with the new reality.

Whatever it might bring.

Before going to bed he decided to check on his refrigerator, to see if Cameron had put a note for him.

At least, he hoped it was Cameron. He couldn’t imagine another reality married to Britney.

But there was no note on the refrigerator, no signs that he lived with someone. In fact, now that he paid attention to the house, it looked emptier than before.

“Oh, boy,” He muttered, and closed his eyes.

* * *

Justin woke up on his bed, and blinked a couple of times. He had no clear idea of where to go. If he had a meeting, or if the group was together. Time-traveling was confusing, alternate realities were even more so. And if he decided to stay in this reality, whatever it had, he had to start figuring out what was different.

Justin arrived at the Jive’s office building a little before ten, with a plan ready. If there was a meeting, he would just nod and agree with whatever they told him. If there wasn’t a meeting, he would just say he needed to ask Johnny about the upcoming ‘thing’, which was nebulous enough to work. He was not leaving without knowing where his career stood.

The first sign that something was seriously wrong were the covers on the Jive’s building lobby. Once again, he could see Keli, Outkast, Too Short, and Pink’s. But the new one was disturbing. It was a photo of Nick Carter, looking mean at the camera, dressed all in black. The cover read ‘Not your toy’.

A second solo Nick Carter album was definitely not what Justin expected to see.

Johnny’s secretary told him that Johnny was busy, but that she could schedule him a meeting next month if he wanted. That was the second sign, but Justin stayed with his plan. He grinned, thanked her for her attention and left the building without much fuss.

No one seemed to care that he was there. It was sign three that there was something seriously fucked up with the new reality. Still, Justin decided not to turn back to his house and try and find another timeline. He wanted to see if Chris and JC were happy.

* * *

Fully aware that he was too early to meet JC at the recording studio, Justin drove aimlessly for a while, listening to the radio.

The more he listened, the more he worried.

Apparently, *Nick Carter* had a second solo album now, *and* an upcoming reality show. Justin vaguely remembered having heard about the reality show once, talking to Lance, back in his original timeline, but back then he had been sure it was just a ‘well, maybe I’ll do it’ thing, and not a sure deal.

There was also the fact that people seemed to care about Nick, and there was no mention at all of the Backstreet Boys.

One DJ, however, mentioned that there were rumors of a fourth *N Sync record. That calmed Justin’s fears a little. *If* *N Sync was still together, then it made sense that Johnny hadn’t seen him alone. Even if scheduling a meeting in a month was strange.

Gathering his courage, he pulled out his cell phone, and dialed memory five. He hoped it was still Chris’s phone.  
.  
“’lo?” And again, it was Lance. Justin grimaced. Chris with Lance had been successful, but in *that* reality, Justin’s career was stalled. He hoped he wasn’t back in a similar one.

“Lance? I… I thought I dialed Chris’s cell,” he said, trying to sound natural. He had learned not to question reality out loud.

“You were trying to get Chris’s cell? What happened? Did they finally break it off and no one told me?” Lance asked him, amused.

“No, I just got confused,” Justin answered carefully. Asking Lance why he wasn’t supposed to call Chris was probably a bad idea because then he would have to explain why he didn’t remember that he was not talking at Chris. “But, hey, how’s everything going for you?”

“Same as it was going last week,” Lance laughed. It was good, Justin guessed, since his friend didn’t seem ready to tear his head out. “Look, I was going to call you anyway. I really would like for you to come to Reichen’s book party, so can I save you a place?”

“Sure, I’ll be there,” Justin lied. At least now he knew that Lance was still with the right boyfriend. Now he just had to figure out why he wasn’t talking to Chris if Chris was dating someone. He just hoped that someone was JC. Things would work out fine. “Look, I have to go. I told JC I would meet him today, but I’ll call you back.”

“JC is going to see you?” Lance sounded surprised. “I thought he was going to keep his head inside the studio until he finished his album. Well, say hello to him for me, ok?”

“I’ll do that.” Justin hung up, puzzled. Sure, JC was supposed to be on the studio, but the way Lance had said it sounded as if he didn’t expect Justin to join him in there.

Trying not to panic, Justin stepped on the accelerator and headed in the direction of the recording studio.

* * *

The definitive sign for Justin that there was something seriously wrong with the new reality was when the security guard at the recording studio told him that he was not on the list of approved people to come in. It took three phone calls, and one more mix up with his cell phone memory that made him call his mom when he thought he was calling JC, for him to locate JC so his friend could fix the mess.

Seeing JC with his same old pink t-shirt and his Leo necklace was a relief. Because if JC was wearing his pink shirt, it meant that he still was on the day *before* Kelly and Briahna had their accident. Justin could work with that, even if he had no idea of what was going on.

“Hey, J! What do I owe the honor?” JC asked, hugging him as if he hadn’t seen him in weeks. For Justin it was weird because he felt as if he had seen JC every day for a week.

“You’re never going to believe what’s going on,” Justin said, shaking his head. In every timeline, JC listened to him and he prayed that this time would be no different. “But first tell me, are you dating someone?”

“You know I’m not, Justin, I haven’t been in the mood of meeting someone ever since, you know, her.” JC looked down at the studio carpet, looking defeated.

Justin couldn’t help but curse under his breath. The image before him was a huge contrast with the happy JC he had seen, practically climbing over Chris.

“Ok, I didn’t know that,” Justin said, looking at his hands to gather his courage. “Look, can we get into the studio? I need some privacy to tell you this.”

“Sure, we were just finished now.”

Trying not to dwell on the fact that JC hadn’t invited him to look over the tracks, Justin followed his friend into the studio booth he was using. Once inside, he took a deep breath and began telling his story.

“I’ve been jumping back in time and accidentally changing the future,” he said, feeling pretty proud of himself for saying everything that JC needed to know in just one sentence.

“That sounds interesting,” JC smiled. It didn’t look as if he believed him, though.

“I know it sounds like madness, but please, JC, you got to believe me, I just came back from a future where we were still *N Sync! Seven albums, packed stadiums, everything. ” And you were dating Chris. But Justin was not going to say that out loud until he was sure that Chris and JC were gay in this timeline.

If they weren’t, well, there was always the option of enough alcohol to drown half of Florida, a party at his house and a closed door. Knowing Chris and JC, a couple of hours would be enough.

Justin was pretty proud of that plan, but first he had to figure out if this particular timeline was good to stay in. He really wanted something like the one before.

“J, I know you took the break up harder than anyone else, but it’s ok. We all know that one day we can get back together.”

“Before that? I was in one when we hadn’t really broke up, but we weren’t together. And I had four albums out. And the night before? Chris had an album out and was getting a second one ready.”

JC looked at him, blinking. “You’re serious.”

“I know it sounds insane. The first time I thought I was dreaming, but that last one was… It was good, C. Really good.”

“I bet it was, if we had managed to hold on for five more years.” JC was smiling, and that was encouragement enough. Justin knew he could convince his friend that he was telling the truth. “You want to go back to that one?”

“I can’t. I mean, I would, if I could go back just one day. Things got ugly there and I… I tried to fix it again. So I ended up here.” Justin sighed. He didn’t want to tell JC what had happened. “There was something that happened, and I thought that if I just changed one thing, the rest would stay the same. But it didn’t so, now we’re here.”

“It sounds like a good dream,” JC told him and Justin groaned. It didn’t matter if JC didn’t believe it was real, as long as he had good advice, he guessed.

“We could have it back,” Justin said after a while. “Sure, it wouldn’t be the same since we’re not together here, but we could have it back. We just need to, you know, have a group meeting and go from there.”

“You know I’ve been always up for it,” JC laughed. “I’m glad you’re ready to talk to Chris, though. How long has it been? Three years?”

“I have no idea, JC,” Justin said. At least with JC he could be truthful. “Last night I was in another reality, remember? Why did I stop talking to Chris anyway? He’s my best friend!”

“J, that’s not funny. I get that you want to talk to Chris again, but saying you don’t remember your fight, it’s not going to work.”

“I don’t know what I did, JC, I am telling the truth,” Justin passed his hand over his head, trying to think. “Look, maybe you’re right, and my time hopping was a dream. I can buy that. But I really *can’t* remember fighting with Chris, let alone not talking to him for three years.”

“You really don’t?” JC raised his eyebrow, incredulous.

“Not at all, hell, even before I dreamed I went back in time, I was fine with Chris. We had just seen each other at your birthday party, and everything was fine.”

“You didn’t go to my birthday party, J.” JC pointed out quietly. “Because he was going to be there.”

“We fought that bad?” Justin asked, biting his lip.

“You never forgave him for being with Nick, J.”

* * *

Justin was sitting on top of the kitchen counter, trying to figure out his thoughts.

After leaving JC at the studio, he had driven aimlessly for three hours, trying to figure out where he had gone wrong.

The first time he had changed something was when he had told Chris that Lance was gay. That had ended up sort of fine, at least for the guys. The second time, Nick had seen him, and things had been insane for the guys, even if he couldn’t complain. He still had no idea what he had done the last time. He hadn’t even seen the guys.

This time, he had talked to *Nick Carter*. *Nick Carter* who apparently was now dating Chris.

Why did he keep making his friends gay?

He had tried to talk to Chris. Unfortunately, Nick was in the middle of taping his reality show, and Chris was with him. No one had wanted to tell him where the house was unless he signed a release form that permitted the TV cameras to tape him, and Justin was sure that he *didn’t* want what he had to say to Chris taped for everyone to see.

Even if every minute that passed, he was convinced that he was not going to stay in this reality. It was too wrong for him.

But he needed a better plan than last time. He didn’t want to go back and find out he had caused Joey and Kelly’s divorce, or Chris joining a cult just because he didn’t think things through.

The problem was, he realized, that no matter what *he* did, there was a long period of time between whenever he jumped in to the present. A lot of things could happen in those five years where he had no idea what was going on. This time, for example, he had probably saved Kelly’s life, but since Nick had obviously called Justin, suddenly they had a Backstreet Boy around, and next thing Justin knew, he was coming into a present where Chris was dating Nick Carter. And Justified had tanked.

He had found the Jive memo, hidden among his multiple notes for songs. Apparently, *this* Justin hadn’t worked on music for almost three years. It was no surprise that Lance hadn’t believed that Justin would meet JC at the recording studio.

Whatever he did, he just had to keep Chris away from Nick Carter. Now or Never was the album that was supposed to tank, not Justified.

The doorbell interrupted his thoughts, and Justin went morosely to answer it. The way his luck was going, it was probably Britney claiming that he had volunteered to babysit.

“You look worse than what JC said,” Chris was standing on the doorway. Chris, looking pretty much like he had done in Justin’s original timeline, only thinner, and less tired. Perhaps a little happier, although Justin had never paid much attention to Chris’s smiles before all the jumping had started. But it was *Chris*, dressed in jeans and a Lee Roth t-shirt, wearing his hair long, covered with a bandana. *Chris* without eyeliner, without extra rings, without extra tattoos.

Justin couldn’t stop himself and hugged his friend as if he was his lifeline.

“Woah! JC wasn’t kidding,” Chris sounded surprised, but didn’t let go. “What’s wrong, Justin?”

“Everyone says you hate me,” Justin said, as if that explained everything. He still remembered that reality when Chris had closed the door to Joey’s house on his face. In *that* reality, Chris had hated him, but Justin hadn’t believed it until he saw it with his own eyes.

“No, last time I heard you hated me,” Chris half-joked. “Come on, J. Tell me, what’s so wrong that you went looking for *me* after all that happened?”

“You would never believe me,” Justin said, letting go of Chris. “In fact, it really doesn’t matter. Do you want to come in?”

* * *

Three hours later, Chris had accepted Justin’s cover story of a nervous breakdown.

“I woke up convinced it was 2000.” Justin made up his story while serving two beers for them. “And you weren’t in my phone list, so I freaked.”

“You must have been drinking a lot to forget six years, J.” Chris had sounded worried, but Justin was starting to get better at hiding the craziness surrounding his life, so he just waved with his glass.

“I’m mostly fine now,” he lied. “I just thought that it was stupid not to talk to you. We have been friends for so long and then what? I ruin it because you’re happy.”

The fact that he still didn’t know if Chris was really happy didn’t matter. With enough time, Chris would be sure to tell him.

“This was some nervous breakdown,” Chris joked. “J., don’t take this the wrong way but just a month ago you said that me appearing on Nick’s show was obviously just a publicity stunt.”

Ouch. That was, Justin thought, a little worse than what he had said about Lance and Chris. At least, when it had been Lance and Chris, Justin hadn’t talked to the press.

“Since when you and Nick have been together, again?” he asked. Deep down, he was hoping for Chris to say seven years. Only then he could believe he had been that childish. After all, he hadn’t reacted that badly to JC and Chris’s love story.

Except that then it had been JC. JC and Chris made sense. Chris and a Backstreet Boy, not so much.

“Three years, give or take,” Chris looked amused. “It was after his second tour, the one after the settlement.”

“The settlement?” Justin frowned. “What settlement?”

“Oh, you know. The one about his promotional stuff,” Chris waved the idea away. “Justin, are you completely sure you’re ok? You don’t need to see a doctor or anything?”

“I’m trying to mend our friendship and you think I’m crazy?” Justin tried to joke. He was starting to think that maybe he could still work on this timeline. Chris and Nick hadn’t been together that long. They could still break up.

Then it would be just a matter of pushing Chris into JC’s arms and the whole group back in the recording studio. It wouldn’t be just like the other timeline, but it could work.

“It’s just a little strange, don’t you think?” Chris looked at him, very seriously. There was a hard edge in Chris’s eyes that Justin couldn’t remember seeing there before. “You call Lance, ask about me. You went to see JC…”

“They called you?” Justin looked up, puzzled. “That’s why you’re here?”

“J. You have been shutting us out for almost a year,” Chris said. “The only one you talk to now is Joey, and with him in Chicago, we…”

“Wait, what did you say?” Justin tried not to think about how apparently he had become the hermit in this timeline instead of Chris. He focused his attention on the fact that Joey was in Chicago. “When did Joey left for Chicago?”

“This afternoon, I think,” Chris frowned. “He, Kelly and Briahna called me from the airport. Why?”

“No way,” Justin didn’t listen to Chris. He got up from his couch and started pacing. “No way. I left *there* so Kelly wouldn’t be on the plane today. What time are they supposed to arrive?”

“I don’t know, Justin. And you’re starting to scare me.” Chris got up too, holding Justin by the shoulders, and looking into his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

Justin took a deep breath, looked straight into Chris eyes and braced himself before answering.

“I think I just killed Joey.”

“What?” Chris laughed nervously. “J, I just talked to him two hours ago.”

“You’ll see,” Justin didn’t listen, biting his lower lip. “Just before midnight, the phone will ring. And it will be Lance, or maybe C, and they’ll tell you that there was an accident. You’ll see.”

He couldn’t believe that was happening. The timeline was different, they weren’t going on tour, and there was no reason for Joey to be in Chicago. No reason at all.

Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t pay attention as Chris got his cell phone out and started dialing. Before the last jump, Chris had been taking care of Briahna, because Kelly and Joey had gone off somewhere. And in the first one, he hadn’t seen Joey either.

Stressing his memory, he managed to remember something JC had told him, back in his original timeline.

That was when Joey asked him to babysit for him and Kelly

Chris, *his* Chris was going to take care of Briahna because Joey and Kelly were going somewhere.

Justin had the sinking feeling that that somewhere was Chicago.

“I’ve been jumping too far back,” he muttered, running to his room and leaving a very startled Chris behind.

* * *

Experience taught him that he couldn’t jump anywhere that had already been changed, so Justin didn’t even try to look for a picture of the last month.

He didn’t even want to think about the fact that his album was thinner. There were less pictures to be kept, and even less of the whole group together.

But he had a new plan. One that could insure that Joey and Kelly wouldn’t be jumping on any plane to Chicago for the duration of 2006 if he could help it, and that his career wouldn’t be on the way to be forgotten.

If he managed to keep Chris away from the Backstreet Boys *and* push him into JC’s arms, Justin would consider his plan a success.

This jump had taught him that he couldn’t leave things to chance. He had to take care of everything himself, in the small window that his time-travel gave him.

“Justin, what are you doing?” Chris entered his room, just as Justin was flipping the pages to find the pictures of 2000. He didn’t want to jump too far back, just in case he still needed to do so again. He couldn’t risk running out of pictures. “I just talked to Lance. Joey’s plane hasn’t landed yet, but as soon as he does, he’ll call you so you can see he’s fine.”

“The plane is not going to land,” Justin muttered. There was the Planet Hollywood picture, looking still pretty much the same as it had the night before. But Justin didn’t focus on it. He knew it wouldn’t work. “I don’t know what happened, but it’s going to happen before midnight. The phone will ring, and if I don’t find a way to fix this, Joey will be dead.”

It wasn’t his fault, Justin realized. Joey would’ve been on that plane even if Justin didn’t jump. But he had a chance to fix it, and even if it had took him a couple of false starts, now that he knew what to do, he could save Joey, Kelly and Briahna.

He just had to find the door.

“Justin, give me that,” Chris moved forward to take the album out of Justin’s hands, so Justin stepped back, not taking his eyes away from the pictures. “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but we’ll try to help you. Nick has a very good psychiatrist and he can…”

Justin didn’t hear the rest of Chris’s phrase, as it was interrupted by the phone ringing. His time was running short, and even though last time he had been able to jump after Joey had answered, he didn’t want to take chances.

“Go, answer it. If nothing happened, I’ll go to Nick’s shrink tomorrow. I promise,” he said to Chris, mostly to get him out of the room. Chris nodded and left him alone, with his pictures.

He had stopped at the page he dedicated to the Latin Grammys. He had a couple of pictures of that performance, most individual shots. But there was one, taken by a photographer that later had sent them to Jive, where he could clearly see the five of them together, singing. They were dressed in dark colors. Joey in particular was wearing a brown long coat that made him look like an extra from the X-files, and Chris and JC were wearing matching suits. That made Justin smile. It was a good moment then, if Chris and JC were sharing styles. He could get them together.

Sure, they were probably not gay yet, but his previous jumping had proven that if anything, Chris was willing to experiment. There was still time before Justin had to deal with Dani, and if this jump worked, he would never happen.

He focused on his tie, black and shiny, willing the picture to open for him.

“What? Fuck, Lance, what?” Justin heard Chris yell, just as the world rippled.

He smiled as he jumped. He could still save Joey.


	6. Cry me a River

[ ](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/jumptimbertrick.jpg)

  
This time, Justin didn’t move a muscle as he took in his surroundings.

He was standing in the backstage of the Latin Grammys, and he could hear himself starting to sing in Spanish.

That gave him four minutes, more or less. With extreme care, to avoid stepping over anything, he leaned against the wall, hiding in the shadows, and ran, hoping no one would see him, to his dressing room.

Justin knew that the problem with all the jumping could be summarized in two words: He couldn’t control what happened when he was not there. Sure, he could tell Chris to stay with JC, but that wouldn’t make Joey not become an actor or insist that Kelly toured with them.

What he needed was absolute control. And that meant talking to the only person in the group he could trust to do things as they should be done.

Himself.

He remembered the Latin Grammy night pretty well. They had sung with the other group and afterwards, Lance, Joey and JC had gone to their seats, Chris had stayed to talk with the lead singer because Chris was determined to learn Spanish, and he had gone to his dressing room to change his coat before going back out.

He was going to be alone in the dressing room. So they could talk. He went to the closet, and hid inside, trying not to make a noise, and not disturb anything. As long as he didn’t make any changes, he could stay. He had learned that much.

Soon enough, the door opened and Justin saw himself, 19 years old and sure that he owned the world. Justin didn’t blame himself. He practically owned his world at 19. Britney hadn’t cheated on him, the group was still going strong, he had his friends and he had no idea that six years later he would end up traveling back in time to see that letting the curls grow that much had been a really bad idea.

“Don’t scream,” he said, coming out of the closet. His younger self looked at him, startled, but to his own credit, he didn’t scream. “I know this is going to sound fucked up, but I’m you.”

“I’m going to call security,” his younger self said, stepping back towards the door. Things were not going according to Justin’s plan. But at least, he hadn’t jumped, yet.

“If you do that, they won’t find me. Listen to me, please,” Justin tried again, raising his hands to show they were empty. “I’m you, from the future. I don’t have the time to prove it because when you believe me, I’ll go back, so listen carefully. Don’t let Chris go, ok? Just, don’t. He’s your future. He, JC, Joey and Lance. But Chris. He’s the important one. You let his friendship go once, and the future is completely ruined. **Our** future is completely ruined, I don’t want to be a has been at 25! So please, don’t let him go. If you let him out of your sight just a second, you’ll end up as a back up singer! Or worse! With no career! **Nick Carter** will be more famous than you! And keep Joey away from Chicago. The city, not the play! Don’t let him go to Chicago until 2007. Ok? It’s very important!”

“Wait… What? Back up singer? Chicago?” Justin’s younger self frowned, and Justin could see that he was starting to believe him. He was starting to feel the pull that usually accompanied his jumps. “You’re from the **future**? And you came to see **me**? Are you insane?! You could cause a paradox and destroy the universe!”

“Well, it didn’t happen, did it?” Justin yelled just as he felt the world start to ripple around him. “Just remember, keeping Chris in the group is the most important thing for the future! And Britney will cheat on you, so dump her! And even more important, cut the curls and back off with the ghetto talk! Yo, what was up with that?”

* * *

Justin opened his eyes, feeling the familiar nausea on the pit of his stomach. He was in a living room now, a bigger one than his own. There was a huge TV set in front of him, and four different game consoles hooked to it.

“Go me,” he whispered. He picked up his photo album, and started flipping through the newest pictures. The ones taken **after** the Latin Grammy. As far as he could tell, they were no different from his original timeline.

He stopped at the Challenge for the Children picture that had started the jumps. It was still there, just as Justin remembered. Chris, himself, Joey, Lance, JC. But there was a slight difference, one that Justin wasn’t sure if he was imagining.

Chris wasn’t smiling.

“Oh, boy,” he muttered, closing his eyes.

* * *

When Justin opened his eyes again, he was on his bed. He was starting to get tired of that, the eternal waking up not knowing where the hell he was, or what to expect of the world outside. At least, he mused looking at the wall in front of him, he seemed to have done better for himself in this timeline. The room looked a lot bigger than the one he remembered sharing with Cameron.

Cameron. Justin closed his eyes, sighing into his pillow. He hoped that this time, he was with Cameron. He hadn’t mentioned her to his younger self, because he remembered how in love he had been with Britney back then. If he mentioned Cam, his younger self would’ve never believed him.

Or that his future was crap, because how could his future be crap if he was with Cameron Diaz?

“Go back to sleep, J. It’s way too early.”

The voice next to him made Justin jump out of the bed.

It wasn’t that it was a male voice, because, well, there had been that **one** time, when he had been extremely drunk right after the release of Justified. Back then Justin had learn to deal with the fact that, even when he preferred women, he wouldn’t say no to a night of mindless sex with a guy.

But even so, he couldn’t help but blanching when Chris looked at him, surprised.

Chris, naked, on bed, with him. Chris, looking hurt at Justin’s reaction.

“Oh, fuck,” Justin said, and that was about all that he could get out before running to the bathroom and starting to puke.

* * *

  
It took Justin an hour before he gathered his courage to get out of the bedroom. The first half of that hour consisted mostly of Chris, sounding worried, trying to get him to come out.

Chris, calling him babe, and love, and ‘stupid fuck, you’re starting to worry me’, and definitively not making things better. Finally, Chris left, yelling at Justin to get his shit together, and not forget his meeting at Jive.

Justin waited ten more minutes of blessed silence before unlocking the door.

Sitting on the stool, Justin started to breathe deeply, trying to calm his thoughts.

Chris had been sleeping on his bed.

Chris had been sleeping **naked** on his bed.

That Chris was gay, or probably bisexual didn’t surprise Justin. He wasn’t going to claim that he had made Chris gay with that first jump, since he had only **told** Chris about Lance’s gayness. What worried Justin is that with each subsequent jump, he kept making **other** people gay. AJ had never once looked at a man, as far as Justin knew, and still he had been with Chris in that one jump.

JC wrote songs about having sex with women, and he had been happy with Chris.

Justin sighed, troubled. Maybe it was **Chris** the one who made people gay, because apparently, now Justin **was** gay.

And he **still** had to go to a meeting at Jive. With the way this jump was going, he was going to meet with Kevin Richardson who would tell him that he was now a member of the Backstreet Boys.

Justin got out of the bathroom, deciding to make it to the meeting quickly. He would nod and agree with everything that whoever was in charge told him, and then go and look for JC. JC could tell him what was going on, and Justin could start working on fixing things.

Until he knew if Joey and Kelly were alright, he wasn’t jumping away. If Joey, Kelly and Briahna were fine, he could deal with living with Chris.

After all, they could break up and then Chris would be free to go with JC.

That was a plan.

On the way to Jive’s building, he started checking his cell phone memory list. Phone one was marked just ‘C’ and Justin guessed it was Chris’s number. That made sense, even if it made him feel sick. What had happened in six years to cause *that*? Phone two was Jive, three Timbaland. Four was his mom.

There wasn’t a single one of his bandmates –former bandmates? Justin didn’t know anymore- in the whole list.

“Justin, hi, I’m glad to see you’re on time,” It was Johnny the one who received him, which made Justin feel a bit grateful. At least he could know what was going on with his career, even if his personal life was a mess. “Look, I know you wanted to see the tour dates, but I need you to work on that remix you told me you wanted to do of Sexy Back, for the Japanese release.”

Justin sighed, relieved. It was pretty much what he had worked with Johnny before the jumps started. “Sure, I can do that. As soon as JC finishes his album I can do the remix in one day, two tops.”

“JC has freed you the studio for today,” Johnny said, suddenly serious. “You can work today and tomorrow, he won’t be there so you don’t have to worry. Just finish the mix and send it here.”

“Sure,” Justin said, wishing to end the meeting as soon as possible to try and figure out the mess that his younger self had made.

* * *

Justin closed his eyes, grabbing the wheel of his car at the Jive’s building’s parking lot. The meeting had been cut short when Johnny received a call, so Justin had been free to try and convince Johnny’s secretary to give him the phone numbers of all the guys.

There were a lot of things not making a lot of sense in that timeline, but the hostile glare that the secretary gave him was one of the weirdest. Even in the last timeline, the one where he had no career at all, she had been nice to him.

The first phone he tried was Joey’s. He had done all the changes in the last two jumps to save Joey, so he wanted to make sure it had been the right choice. However, he only got the answering machine.

“Joey?” he asked, after the beep. “Are you there screening calls? I hope not. Look, it’s me, Justin. I need to talk to you. I don’t know if you have my home number, but you can call me to my cell. Give my love to Briahna and Kelly, ok? And please, I’m sorry for everything I’ve done, I just need to talk.”

He hung up, hoping that his message had been vague enough to make Joey call him back. He had no idea where he had gone wrong this time –although Chris on his bed was a very big clue. His next attempt was Lance, who picked it up on the second ring.

“’lo? Who’s this?” Lance’s question made Justin’s stomach drop. Lance’s phone had to have all his friend’s number’s listed. Lance was like that, even having his friends’ Myspace URLs memorized. If he didn’t know Justin’s phone, it was because he didn’t considered Justin a friend.

“Lance? Please, don’t hang up, it’s me, Justin,” Justin said quickly. “I need to talk to you.”

“Justin, I’m in a Barnes and Noble, waiting for Reichen to finish signing his book, I can’t make a scene here, so just say what you want to say and I’ll hung up and we’ll keep on with our happy lives. If what worries you is that I will mention you in my book, don’t worry, I won’t. You might thing nothing of it, but I care too much about Chris to do that,” Lance practically hissed. His voice sounded as if he was clenching his teeth.

“What? No, no Lance, it’s not about your book,” Justin sighed. He didn’t even know Lance was writing a book. “It’s about Chris.”

“What did you do to him?” Lance sounded angry, and Justin figured that whatever he had done, it hadn’t been good. How come everyone who got Chris in the other timelines was happy, and now he was stuck in a world where apparently, his friends hated him?

“I…” Justin stopped, trying to think fast. If he said the wrong thing, Lance would hung up on him. “I’m planning a surprise party for him on his birthday, and I wanted to invite you all. I know it’s a little too soon, but with our busy schedules and all, I thought it was best to let you know now.”

“You want **us** in your house?” Justin let out the breath he had been holding. Lance now sounded shocked, but it was better than angry.

“Yeah, look I know it’s unexpected but…”

“No, no. We’ll be there,” Lance interrupted him. Justin was glad of that because he had no idea of how to keep going. He would leave some notes on his agenda about the surprise party. He still didn’t know what happened to the different timelines when he jumped again, but if they stayed, he wanted his alternate self to try and fix his mess. “For Chris.”

“I know, thanks, Lance. We’ll talk later,” Justin smiled on the phone. If he could fix things, maybe this wouldn’t be a bad place to stay.

* * *

Half an hour later, Justin wasn’t that optimistic about the future. JC hadn’t answered at his home, on his cell, or even at the studio. When he had arrived to the studio, the guard at the door told him that JC had left an hour before.

Justin banged his head against the wheel of the car. JC had been his rock in the last few jumps, he always knew what to do.

If he couldn’t talk to JC, Justin feared he would do something wrong. So instead of staying around and working on a remix that Justin knew he would probably never use, especially if he jumped out again, he asked for JC’s home address and decided to go and visit him personally.

JC wasn’t home when Justin arrived, so he decided to wait, sitting on the steps of the house.

As he waited, he started thinking about the newest timeline, what he knew about it, and if it was a good idea to stay here.

On the plus column, his career seemed to have the same path as it had on the original timeline. Since his original plan had always been to return to it, Justin couldn’t complain about that. He was successful, he was famous and his music was his own again.

On the bad column, if Lance and Johnny’s reactions were anything to go by, his friends hated him. Johnny had acted as if Justin didn’t talk to any of the *N Sync members at all, and Lance had answered even angrier than the time when apparently Justin had flipped because Lance and Chris were together.

Being Chris’s partner was in the middle column. Justin truthfully didn’t know what to think about it. He still didn’t think he was gay, and if Chris was –and he really had to figure out if he had made Chris gay with that first jump or he had just didn’t know before that- it wouldn’t be fair for them to stay together.

He didn’t even know what Chris was doing with his life now. He only knew that Chris was living with him and that was it.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Justin had been so immersed in his thoughts, that he never heard JC’s car arrive. He looked up, surprised, to meet the furious face of his friend. JC didn’t look much different from his original timeline either. Still wearing his hair short, still wearing the same pink shirt that Justin was starting to hate.

“JC, I need your help, please!” Justin was up in an instant, trying to think fast on what to say to JC to make him stop and talk to him. JC simply ignored him, opening the door to his house and stepping in.

“Too bad,” JC said suddenly, turning to look at Justin with a sneer. “I only help my friends. Get out of here before I call security.”

And with that, he closed the door to Justin’s face.

* * *

There were three things that Justin couldn’t live without. His fame, Chris’s friendship and JC’s friendship.

He could live in a world where Lance hated him. He could live in a world where Joey hated him. And mostly, he could do that because he trusted that he could fix things and make them like him again. He was **Justin Timberlake** , everyone liked him. That was another one of the truths that his mom had taught him when he was a kid. Those who didn’t like him at first didn’t know better. They only needed a chance to see how great Justin was.

After JC closed the door on his face, Justin felt lost. JC was his best friend since he had been ten. His older brother, his friend, his writing partner. There wasn’t a single thing Justin could do to make JC hate him, and Justin had done practically everything to him, including disbanding *N Sync when JC still had wanted to go on forever.

And no one was answering Joey’s phone.

Justin was aware that he couldn’t go and ask Chris what was wrong because he couldn’t lie to Chris and say that he had just forgotten everything about their relationship. Chris would never believe that, not like JC. So he did the one thing that had never occurred him to do before.

He stopped in the nearest computer store, bought a laptop with wireless internet and logged in. Lance had once told him that everything you wanted to know about their lives was on the internet, and while Justin had never believed him, it was a good time to find out if it was true.

Three hours later, a lot of bytes told him a story that he wasn’t sure he wanted to believe. If he kept to the news sites, the story was pretty much done with in 2002, when *N Sync had announced that they were breaking up for ‘artistic differences’. After that, all the reports he could find were news about his own album, the infamous nipplegate, Lance coming out, and JC’s solo album. There was a report on Joey’s wedding, at which JC and Lance assisted. Justin was mentioned as absent, but there was not a word about Chris.

In fact, there weren’t any news about Chris after the report of Fumanskeeto closing down. Only a couple of blurry pictures of Chris in some of Justin’s events, with the caption “Justin’s former bandmate came to lend his support” and that was it.

The fan sites, though, painted a completely different picture.

Googling ‘Chris Kirkpatrick’ brought him a great deal of pages, the first one being Kirkpatrick.nu, which claimed to be **the** source to get news about Chris. But there were no news about Chris, only sightings, and all of them in Justin’s company. The latest picture they had of him was at the Future Sex/Love Sounds release, and there was no mention of a band, of new projects. He was listed as one of Justin’s producers and writers, but there weren’t any songs written by him on either Justified or Future Sex.

Chris’s mySpace page was as empty as it always was, although there were a couple of new/old pictures on it, one from before *N Sync disbanded, that showed them all at Challenge of the Children. Justin frowned when he saw the picture. It was a different version of the one that had gotten him into the time traveling mess. It had changed again, now with JC in the center of it, wearing a red jersey. Justin had his arms around Chris and JC’s shoulders, smiling brightly. Chris had titled the picture “Good times”.

The other picture was a picture of them together at the Justified release party. Chris was talking to Justin, who was smiling. Justin, of course, didn’t remember that moment. Chris hadn’t gone to the release party Justin remembered. They looked happy. The picture was titled ‘taken by a friend.’

Justin still didn’t have a clear idea of what had happened. But the picture that he was getting was not a good one. He remembered one of his last fights with Britney, before she went and slept with Wade. She had called him a controlling self-centered psychotic bastard, who was even jealous of Britney’s sister. At the time, Justin had only told her that she had no idea what half of those words meant, and he had actually believed that. But now, the words came back to haunt him.

Justin knew that he had always been a little too possessive. He hadn’t actually thought about it until he started dating Cameron. Cameron, who was older and a lot wiser than him, had made him see that most of his jealousy came from the fact that he had very few real friends, people whom he could call friends and know they weren’t looking for him because he was famous. That made him insanely jealous of anyone who came close to that circle of friends.

As a lover, he was even more jealous, and it had taken him two years of therapy and of Cameron’s patience to get him to realize that and start to change it.

Chris, however, had known about that. He had lived with Justin for ten years, seeing him with Britney and a couple of girlfriends in between, and never said a word.

Not liking the direction his thoughts were taking, Justin closed the laptop and got ready to drive back home.

* * *

When he got back home, Chris was inside already, playing Halo.

“You got your problem out of your system?” Chris asked, sounding bored.

“Mostly, I’m sorry about this morning,” Justin said, sitting down on the couch next to Chris, who paused the game.

“Lance told me you called him, he asked if aliens had abducted you,” Chris smiled at him, and Justin felt his stomach knot. He knew that smile, it was Chris’s loving and patient smile, the kind of smile he gave when he was being the responsible adult in the conversation. “What did you tell him to give him that impression?”

“I told him I wanted to see him, you know, to pass the time,” Justin lied quickly. If he was staying, he had to make a surprise party and he wasn’t going to ruin it by telling Chris about it.

“Well, I just checked the house and I didn’t found a pod, so do you mind telling me what is going on?”

“When are you going to record again?” Justin asked, changing the subject. Chris sighed, looking at the paused game.

“Who told you I was recording anything?”

“Come on, Chris, you don’t just stay around the house playing videogames,” Justin said, hoping it was true. His friend had too much talent to waste it like that.

“Fuck, J. It’s not that I didn’t want to tell you. I just knew you were going to flip just like you did when I said I wanted to work with C.” Chris was looking at his hands, as if he was thinking on what to say. “Look, a couple of friends are making a band, they asked me to do some vocals, and that was it. I was just helping them.”

“I shouldn’t have flipped at you and C,” Justin says, and now he has another piece of the puzzle. When it came to a perceived threat to his relationships, Justin knows he can be a lot more vicious than when it was just about a perceived threat to his career. “I just realized it now.”

“Therapy is working, isn’t it?” Chris smiled and leaned in for a kiss. Justin braced himself, trying not to move away. It was strange to kiss his best friend.

Chris didn’t let the kiss linger, and Justin knew that no matter what, he couldn’t stay in the timeline. Maybe the Justin his younger self had become loved Chris, but he didn’t. And Chris deserved to be with someone that loved him.

* * *

It was around ten when Justin pulled out the photo album. Chris was on the kitchen, getting something to eat, so Justin started flipping through the pages looking for a place to jump to. He still didn’t know if Joey was fine, but he still thought that he needed to get Chris with someone who loved him, and not someone who had been thinking about Cameron Diaz while they kissed.

“What are you doing?” Chris sat next to him, holding a sandwich and almost making his heart jump out of his chest. He had never traveled with someone watching.

“Just looking at some old pictures,” Justin answered, trying to keep his voice normal. “Remembering.”

“You really want to see the guys again, don’t you?” Chris asked, studying him with his eyes.

“Yeah,” Justin sighed, not looking at Chris. Not even when Chris hugged him and started looking at the pictures. “I’ve been trying to reach Joey too, but no one answers at his house.”

“Oh, they’re not home,” Chris said, casually, flipping the pages with him. “They went to visit Joey’s parents in New York.”

There was one from the Teen Choice Awards in 2000 that had him, JC and Chris holding the surfing board award. They were smiling, but Justin realized that JC’s and Chris’s smiles were forced. That picture had been taken a couple of months before the Latin Awards, and Justin couldn’t remember why Lance and Joey weren’t there.

It didn’t really matter, since he couldn’t jump in that picture. Not without the other two.

“Fuck, I remember that,” Chris said, putting his finger on top of his own face. “I had just broken up with JC and I wanted to be anywhere but there, but without Lance or Joey, Johnny didn’t want to send only two of us to get the award.”

“You… broke up with JC then?” Justin looked up, surprised. “I didn’t know you had dated him then.”

“Of course you knew,” Chris hit him in the shoulder, playfully. “I told you years ago, right before we started living together. I can’t believe you forgot when it was my main reason **not** to date you.”

“I just… I just forgot,” Justin finished lamely. That made no sense. That picture had been taken before any changes made by his jumping. Which meant that he hadn’t turned JC gay.

That was good news. It meant that if he could just jump a little while before they broke up, he could help them to stay together. If a world where JC and Chris had broken up and then come back together had been so great for *N Sync, Justin figured that a world where JC and Chris never broke up had to be even better. And now Joey hadn’t gone to Chicago, so everything would work out.

The phone rang, startling Justin. Even if Joey and Kelly were in New York, he still was wary of that sound.

“I’ll get it,” Chris said, getting up. Justin smiled at him, memorizing the image of his best friend happy and in love. He promised himself he would see Chris like that again.

He stopped his flipping at a picture taken just a few weeks before the Teen Choice awards, during the filming of the Today Show. Lance was on the far edge of the picture, looking at something outside it, with his usual calm stare, while JC was pointing at his own microphone, probably in answer to something someone had asked him. Chris was looking at Justin, with a bewildered expression, while Justin was laughing at him. He was wearing a green shirt, and a blue bandana, as well as a pair of black tennis with red flames painted on them. Joey wasn’t actually listening to the conversation, his attention focused on his audiophone.

“Hey, Kel! How are you?” Chris answered the phone, and Justin turned slightly to see his friend. Chris smile was starting to become a frown. “What? What happened?”

Justin blanched. Chris looked shocked, and it couldn’t be. Kelly and Joey were in New York, not in Chicago. Even if he had managed to fuck up everything else, Justin **had** saved Joey’s life. He knew that.

“Shit, Kelly, no. You know you can count on us,” Chris looked up to see Justin, and mouthed the words ‘car accident’ to him. “I’ll call Lance, and we’ll be there with you tomorrow morning.”

Justin didn’t wait for Chris to hang up. He turned to see the picture again, no longer caring if appearing in the middle of a live TV filming was a bad idea, and focused. The picture **had** to ripple.

After what felt like a long time, his earring sparkled, the world rippled, and the last thing he heard of a world where he had loved his best friend, was Chris’s startled voice.

“Justin?!”


	7. As Long as you love me

[   
](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/group4910.jpg)

  
Justin stepped back instinctively as soon as the dizziness passed, luckily finding a wall behind him. He could see the stage perfectly, where they were sitting on stools getting ready to perform. No one seemed to be paying attention to him, but he knew he couldn’t count on that to last for long.

He hadn’t had a lot of time to figure out what to do. He already knew that talking to himself was a terrible idea, and he wasn’t going to risk talking to Chris again. In fact, talking to anyone in *N Sync sounded like a terrible idea.

And he didn’t want to talk to the Backstreet Boys either. His only two contacts with the other group had ended in two very, very bad realities for himself. Even if Chris had looked happy with Nick, the best possible thing for *N Sync was for Chris to end up with JC.

He had to plan his next move carefully. He didn’t want to end up in a timeline where he was forgotten by everyone **again** , or in a timeline where Chris was miserable. Whatever he did, it had to be carefully executed.

“Oh, sorry,” Justin felt the bump and almost didn’t hear the apology, turning to see the woman standing next to him. Just like in the Billboards awards, he hadn’t been careful enough. He just hadn’t had enough time. But the dizziness didn’t come, and he didn’t felt the jump, so he forced himself to smile and turn around to meet whoever had bumped into him

“It’s ok, I wasn’t paying attention,” he said to the tall blonde, biting his tongue after he spoke. He hadn’t seen her very often, but he still recognized her. Kristen Richardson was hard to forget, even if, making a quick mental subtraction, she wasn’t Richardson yet.

“Excuse me, have we met before?” she asked, frowning a little. Justin knew right there that she was trying to place his face. His only consolation was that even when he still looked pretty young, there had to be enough differences so she wouldn’t peg him as **Justin Timberlake**.

“I don’t think so,” Justin answered smiling. He had always been polite to Kevin’s wife. “I would remember someone as pretty as you.”

In the very instant he said those words, Justin realized he had made a mistake, because he had barely time to register that she was smiling back at him, a cute, flirtatious smile, before the world rippled around him and the Today Show taping disappeared around him.

* * *

The floor under his feet wasn’t moving, which Justin decided to take as a good sign. As much as he had enjoyed the touring timeline, he preferred to be near his house in case he needed to jump out again.

Besides, the nausea of the jumps was getting to him. Even if he was no longer throwing up, his stomach still felt as if it had been on a rollercoaster for two days, without the rest of his body to work as a cushion.

Breathing deeply, he braved to look around the house. It looked pretty much like his old house, even if there was something different Justin couldn’t put his finger on. The decorations were more subdued, but nothing that could actually tell him if he had jumped into a bad timeline or a good one.

The note on his refrigerator read: “Hon, don’t forget your meeting tomorrow. I’ll be back at 7.”

No signature, but Cameron had never called him ‘Hon’.

Sighing deeply, he covered his face with his left hand. It was **then** that he saw the golden ring on his ring finger. A wedding band, mocking him with its presence.

“Oh, boy,” He muttered, and closed his eyes.

* * *

Justin was getting used to waking up in bed after traveling. At times, he toyed with the idea of not getting up. Just staying in bed until midnight, waiting for the call that would tell him what new disgrace had happened to Joey just because Justin was having troubles staying in just one timeline at a time.

His bed was much bigger, bigger than his usual king size.

There were framed pictures on the nightstand, and he didn’t want to see them because he knew that they would be showing him with whomever was his wife. Probably Britney, because he couldn’t imagine marrying someone else. Not even Cameron.

Besides, it couldn’t be Cameron. If he had married Cameron, the note on the fridge would be signed.

Drawing a big breath, he finally gathered his courage and picked up the nearest frame. On it, he could see himself, perhaps two, three years younger, dressed in a black tuxedo, hugging a familiar blonde in a wedding dress.

Kristen Richardson.

Kristen Timberlake, his mind corrected. Somehow, he had managed to marry Kevin’s wife.

“Kevin must hate me here,” Justin put the frame back on the night table. “I probably joined witness protection just to stay away from him.”

Fully aware that he shouldn’t just stay in bed and hope reality would fix itself, Justin got dressed and went downstairs. If he was lucky, JC wouldn’t hate him here. And Chris and JC had been together in the past, where Justin hadn’t made a mess out of **their** lives, only his. So maybe Chris and JC were together, and things were fine for the group.

If things were fine for the group, he could live with Kevin trying to kill him.

He was making plans on how to figure out the timeline without going to Jive and making breakfast when Chris came in the kitchen, wearing a boxers and a t-shirt.

“Morning, J,” Chris said, passing on his way to the refrigerator.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“You told me I could drop by whenever I wanted,” Chris answered, not even surprised at his reaction. “And I needed a place to stay tonight.”

“What happened to your house?” Justin breathed deeply. He was married to Kristen Richardson, he could handle a surprise visit from Chris that early in the morning. The fact that Chris seemed so at ease in his house was good, Justin figured. It meant that they still were friends.

Maybe **this** reality was the good one.

He couldn’t deny that his wife was hot.

“Had a fight,” Chris answered. Justin bit his tongue not to ask for more details. There was something in Chris’s tone that told him that Chris was not going to give him more details. “I hope you and Kristin don’t mind me staying for a while.”

“No, of course not,” Justin said, forcing himself to smile. He sure hoped Kristen wouldn’t mind.

* * *

He left Chris after breakfast, claiming that he had to go to his meeting at Jive.

Chris hadn’t told him anything more about the fight, but Justin had learned to be more observant in the past few days. There weren’t any wedding bands around Chris’s fingers, so his friend wasn’t married. Chris usually talked about his partners by name, but this time, he only mentioned a ‘him’, which meant that either Justin wasn’t supposed to know who Chris was dating, or Chris had gotten used to the secrecy.

Neither option was a good one for Chris’s happiness, in Justin’s humble opinion.

But if Chris wasn’t going to give him more information, Justin was going to go out and find it. He needed to know if he had managed to fix everyone else’s lives, even if his own was a little messy at the moment.

The radio didn’t help him. Sexy Back was played twice on the way to Jive, and the office building looked exactly the same. It wasn’t until Justin checked the company directory that he realized that the Backstreet Boys had stopped recording with Chapter One. Never Gone wasn’t listed.

He cancelled his meeting with Johnny and decided to go straight to the recording studio, to meet JC.

He was thinking about what he was going to tell his friend, how to fish information to know if JC was the mysterious ‘him’ that Chris had mentioned, when his phone cell started ringing. It was the generic ring, so he had to look at the LCD screen to figure out who was the caller.

It was Brian Littrell, so Justin breathed deeply and took the call.

“Hey,” he said, trying not to give up anything. He didn’t even know if he was friendly with Brian or if he hated him for marrying his cousin’s girlfriend.

“Hey, J.” Brian sounded quite friendly, which was strange. Even in his timeline, he and Brian weren’t exactly close. “Look, I was wondering, are you and Kristen free this weekend?”

“Sure, I think so,” Justin lied. He had no idea what he was going to be doing on the weekend. He didn’t even know if he was going to be **there** on the weekend. “Why?”

“Well, Lieghanne is going to see her parents with the kids, so I got the house free,” Brian said, maybe a little too cheerfully. “So I thought I would make a party, you know? For all my friends. You, Kirsten, Nick, Chris, Lance… everyone. What do you say?”

“Count us in.” Justin found himself smiling. Maybe in this timeline, he had managed not to screw his friendship with everyone. He still didn’t know how he had ended up marrying Kristen. Maybe Kevin didn’t hate him. “Do you want me to ask Chris?”

“He’s at your house?”

“Yeah, he’s visiting us for the week,” Justin smiled as he finally arrived to the studio. “Look, I have to go. I’ll call you later so you can tell me all the details, all right?”

“Yeah, I’ll wait for your call.” Brian hung up, and Justin let out a relieved sigh. He had managed a whole conversation, and Brian hadn’t suspected a thing. He was getting better at pretending he knew what was going on.

* * *

JC was waiting for him to start to work on his remix. That alone was a good sign for Justin. It meant that marriage or not, his career was still on the same track as it was supposed to be.

As every single time before, JC was wearing his pink t-shirt, only the Leo necklace was missing. That made Justin bit his lip. JC had only took off his Leo necklace twice. In his original timeline, and Justin had never asked why he had done that, and in the one where he was with Chris. He prayed silently that JC hadn’t been the one who had fought with Chris that morning.

“You’re early, J.” JC shook his hand, leading him into the recording booth. “I thought you weren’t going to come until this afternoon.”

“There is something I need to tell you,” Justin said, trying to put his thoughts in order. He knew JC would believe him. If he was talking to him, JC believed him. “But first tell me, are you dating someone?”

“You know I’m not, Justin, I just broke up with Eva, I don’t think I’m in the mood for meeting anyone new.” JC looked down at the studio carpet, looking defeated.

Justin sighed. It was not exactly a good thing, but at least JC and Chris hadn’t fought. And if Chris was with a guy, and had fought with that guy, there was a chance to push his friends together. Maybe at Brian’s get together.

“I didn’t want to bring you back bad memories,” Justin apologized sincerely. He was starting to hate seeing JC so down. “But I had to know. Because what I’m going to tell you is absolutely insane and if you had been with someone who wasn’t her, I bet you wouldn’t believe me.”

“What are you talking about?” JC frowned, confused.

“I’ve been jumping back in time and accidentally changing the future,” he said. It was the same thing he had told JC a couple of timelines back, but it still worked as a summary.

“You went to a time where you weren’t married to Kristen?” JC shook his head, smiling. “That sounds like a bad nightmare.”

“I wasn’t married to Kristen yesterday, C.” Justin sat down, lowering his head. “I wasn’t married to Kristen today. I was living with Chris. And married to Britney. And on tour. And living miserable and alone. I’ve been repeating this day over, and over, and over again.”

When JC didn’t answer, Justin looked up, worried. He half expected to see his friend calling someone, probably the local psychiatric hospital. But JC had just dragged a chair and sat before him.

“I think I could deal with traveling to the past, but living the same day over and over again sounds boring,” JC said, after a while. “You’re sure it’s the same day?”

“Unless you’ve got a closet full of pink shirts, it is the same day,” Justin sighed. “And it always ends with something bad happening to Joey.”

“Oh, Justin,” JC muttered, making Justin look up alarmed. He didn’t like the way in which JC’s voice had broke. “Shit. You know it wasn’t your fault, right?”

Justin tried to keep his breathing even, not to freak out. “C… What happened to Joey?”

He really didn’t want to hear the answer. He didn’t want to see JC reach out to grasp his hands and tell him that Joey’s accident in New Orleans during the rehearsals of Pop Odyssey had been almost fatal, or that his friend had lost a leg.

He couldn’t believe that he had caused that change just by talking to Kristen, back in 2000.

It couldn’t be his fault.

* * *

Justin hadn’t even had the chance to open the door of his house when a furious Chris opened it for him.

After leaving JC, he had decided that he was not going to stay there any longer. It didn’t mattered if his career was doing well, if JC’s career was doing fine. Joey had lost a leg, and, according to JC, closed himself off from everyone.

That wasn’t right. He had to change it again, and fix things.

“Why did you tell him I was here?” Chris asked, as soon as the door was open.

“Tell who?” Justin blinked, confused. He hadn’t forgotten that Chris was staying with him, but he had hoped that his friend had left somewhere for the afternoon.

“Brian, of course!” Chris raised his hands, as if giving up. “Shit, J. I thought you understood I didn’t want to see him right now.”

Justin blinked, understanding dawning on him.

“Oh. Oh, shit. You and Brian.” Justin closed his eyes, gritting his teeth. Why Chris couldn’t stay with one partner? And why with Brian? Chris had never fooled with a married woman, why here he was with a married man? “Fuck, I’m sorry Chris, I should’ve kept my mouth shut.”

“Yeah, you should’ve,” Chris shook his head, going inside the house. “Why didn’t you?”

Because last I knew you were with me and not with Brian, wasn’t a good answer and Justin knew it. Because I had totally forgotten you had a lover, was a worst answer. Chris usually didn’t think Justin was self centered, but if he admitted he had forgotten something that Chris had probably only told him, things were going to end up badly.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.” It was a lame excuse, and he knew that, but it was the only thing that came to his mind. “I was just trying to help.”

“I know,” Chris got inside the house, so Justin followed, hoping that it meant that he would get some time alone. While he knew he could jump even if he was being watched, he really didn’t like the idea of jumping away with Chris talking to him. “I’m a bit tense today, I’m sorry.”

Realizing that the only way he had to stop whatever had happened to Chris in this timeline was to know what had happened, Justin decided to try and figure things out. He still couldn’t believe that he had managed this particular scenario just by smiling at Kristen once.

“So, uhm, do you want to talk about what happened?” He said, trying to sound helpful. The truth was that he had little experience listening to other people problems. Mostly, other people listened to him.

“Brian got the divorce papers filled today, but he didn’t give them to Leighanne,” Chris said, sitting down on the couch. “He’s afraid that she will fight him for the custody of Baylee and Allan.”

Justin had no idea when had Allan been born, since his memory swore that Brian Littrell only had one kid, but he nodded with what he hoped was a wise expression. He only could think that obviously Chris was a bad influence on Brian, because Brian had straight out lied to Justin on the phone, acting as if nothing was wrong, probably just to find out where Chris was.

“You think she will?” he asked, still trying to figure out the situation.

“I don’t know.” Chris shook his head, defeated. “I wish I could tell him that she won’t, but she was never too happy about us, so it could go either way.”

If he had any idea of how they had started dating, Justin could have a good advice for his friend. Or at least something more than just staying there, sitting next to Chris.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, trying to sound as if at least he had any idea of what was going on.

“I want us to be happy,” Chris answered, smiling at him. “And we will, don’t worry. It’s only a matter of time.”

“Yeah, I guess it is.” Justin smiled too, while he was making mental math. He just had to be more careful. He had managed a good reality once, he knew he could find that one again, or another like it.

It was only a matter of time.

* * *

Justin waited until eleven to see if anyone called him. Kristen called to his cell around eight, to tell him she was coming back home the day after tomorrow, but that had been the only call. Chris had gone out, presumably to a club a little after that.

While he was sure that this time there wouldn’t be a Fatone on a fatal accident, Justin didn’t feel relief in that knowledge. Joey’s life was pretty much fucked up already. He just *had* to fix that.

The problem was that he still had no idea of how he was making the changes. At first, he had entertained the idea that maybe he was making the changes happen, but after finding out that Chris and JC had been together **before** any of his jumps, and realizing that sometimes, what happened was completely out of his control, he had figured out that it wasn’t **his** fault.

It was the fault of whatever that was making him jump, of course.

So he needed a better plan, one that ensured that there was the least possible margin of error. He still had a good stash of pictures, at least five years worth of moments with the five of them together where he could jump, but Justin wasn’t planning for more than one jump.

He had it figured out. There were three things that all his jumps had in common, ever since his original timeline. He had to figure out how to keep Chris happy, and Joey and his family safe. His successful career was the third, but Justin had the sneaky suspicion that if he could manage one and two, three would come along nicely.

Number two, keeping Joey safe, was the one that was giving him trouble. He could more or less have some input in Chris’s love life when he jumped far in the past, but that didn’t insure Joey’s well being.

But whatever that was making him jump had also counted on that. Justin kept repeating the same day, over and over, so if he just called Joey and stopped him from going to Chicago, next reality would be the one where everything was fine.

He had gotten it right the first time, he realized. After seeing all the different timelines, Justin had figured out that it all centered in the trust they had with each other as a group. Talking to Chris that first time had not solved everything, but that had probably been because Justin was too old by the time his friends came out as a couple in that timeline.

Justin had to admit that by the time he was 20, he was too self aware of what bad publicity could do to his career.

He just needed a place to talk to the younger Chris, in private. Just give him a few pointers, to keep the timeline as close as possible to the one where *N Sync had been in top of the world. Not let his friends go, don’t let silly fights escalate. Check the springs for every single gimmick they did, just in case.

Then, come back, call Joey, and make sure neither he nor Kelly would be traveling around that day.

It was simple; it was so easy that Justin couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of that before.

* * *

Finding the right picture had taken time.

Even when Justin was sure that he only needed one more jump, he didn’t want to jump too far back that he wouldn’t have an extra out, just in case. He had limited his search to 2000, because that was when he figured things had started going wrong. With the success of No Strings Attached, and when everyone and his mom had started telling him that he didn’t need the others.

He just needed to get Chris to see that Jive didn’t have to have the last word about their publicity. If Chris saw that, if Chris got more involved in the politics around the group, Justin was sure that the group’s future would be different.

He still hoped for a solo career, but after all this jumping he had realized he missed his friends.

The picture he ended up choosing was one from the release of No Strings Attached, at the Virgin Records Megastore. They were fresh out of the legal battle against Transcon, together and sure that they could take the world. He was wearing a red knitted sweater under a leather brown jacket, smiling and standing next to Chris, who was wearing a three-tone blue knitted sweater. In the middle of the picture, JC stood out, with a white turtleneck, his arms crossed, smiling to a camera slightly to the right. Joey had his arm over Lance’s shoulder, wearing a black Superman baseball cap. Lance was looking sideways to something out of the camera reach, with a strange smirk on his face.

Justin looked into the picture, trying to lose himself on it. For a moment, he was scared that it wouldn’t work, that since his phone wasn’t ringing, since Joey wasn’t in a fatal accident, he wouldn’t be able to jump. But finally, JC’s sweater started trembling, and the world rippled away once more.


	8. How did I fall in love with you

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](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/group5539.jpg)

  
Justin supposed he should feel worried when the nausea didn’t grab him as he finished his jump. After so many jumps, he was getting used to it. And now he was sure what he was going to do. He only needed to get his timing right.

The Virgin Megastore was filled to the brim, so his appearance was completely unnoticed by security or the fans

That was his plan all along: just like at the Latin Grammys, he needed to stay on this particular time as long as he could. And this time he wasn’t going to mess things up by talking to future Backstreet’s wives.

Very, very carefully, trying not to call attention to himself, he edged towards the wall. He kept an eye on the crowd, assuring himself that he wasn’t going to trip anyone. He was very near the table where in minutes, he knew they all were going to sit down and sign some albums, still unaware that they had managed to break every single sale record that very same day.

Thanks to that fact, he remembered that day pretty well. It had been marked by his mom as the day where everything started to fall in place for his stardom to begin, and he agreed with her. Only now he knew it was not only his career. It was everyone’s. And if he couldn’t return to 2001 to stop his younger self from destroying the group, he was going to make sure that someone in 2000 held to *N Sync with teeth and nail.

He lowered his head just a little as he saw himself past next to him, followed by Lance, Joey and JC. Counting his steps, he turned around. He remembered that day, Chris had been just a couple of minutes late, due to some problem with the wardrobe. So he had at least 4 minutes to try and convince Chris that what they were doing were worth fighting even Justin’s stubborn desire to have a solo career.

But he also had the feeling that Chris wouldn’t just believe the same story Justin had told his younger self. Chris would ask questions that Justin wasn’t ready to answer. Some that Justin didn’t know how to answer, so he had to do something he hadn’t done in years.

He had to act, and act humble.

Grabbing a couple of water bottles from a nearby table, he looked at himself in a nearby window. He knew that he didn’t look as if he had been working in retail, but he was willing to try and fool Chris. It only had to be for a few minutes. As soon as Chris **believed** him, he was going to jump anyway.

“Mr. Kirkpatrick?” He asked, knocking on the door to their dressing room.

“Just a second!” Chris’s voice came from behind the door, but Justin didn’t had time to make an excuse to enter as his friend came out, looking stressed. “What?!”

“My.. uh…manager though you might want some water,” Justin answered, offering him the bottle in his hands. In his head he kept chanting the mantra of ‘You’re not his Justin, he’s not going to be nice to you’.

“Oh, thanks,” Chris smiled grabbing the bottle, before looking at Justin again. Justin bit his tongue, nervous. This was it, the trial of fire. “Say, has anyone ever told you that you look just like an older Justin?”

“Until they see me dance,” Justin tried to smile, hoping it would look modest. “Got two left feet.”

“Still… The resemblance is amazing. Are you related to Lynn Harless?” Chris was still studying him with his eyes, making Justin feel nervous. But at least, he didn’t feel the nausea that accompanied the jump. He still had to make a difference

“Not that I know,” Justin managed to say. He knew Chris wouldn’t launch into the story of his life in front of a total stranger, so he had to steer the conversation quickly, before he lost his only chance because Chris was finishing his drink and getting ready to go up to the table with the others “Mr. Kirkpatrick? That’s a great group you have.”

“Chris,” his friend said, pointing with the bottle. He looked surprised. “And thanks, but it isn’t just my group. We all work together on this.”

“Not really,” Justin insisted, speaking quickly. “I… I’m a fan. I know that you were the one who put it all together. And I have the feeling that you guys? Are going to get big. This store? It will be nothing compared to the places you will fill.”

“Thanks, man,” Chris was starting to look at him with suspicion, and more than a little fear. Justin knew that look. It was the look they all got when they were about to look for security. “I… I’ve got to go now.”

“I know what it sounds like,” Justin hurried to say. “But I have a great eye for that. Just, if you want the advice from the waterboy? Don’t let fame get to your head. I mean, you don’t look like someone who would let it get to your head, but… don’t forget your friends. And don’t let fame get to **his** head.”

He finished, pointing to himself, and as Chris turned to see where he was pointing at he started to feel the familiar pull of the jump.

Justin had only time to feel puzzled when Chris looked back at him, right in the instant the world started to ripple around him.

* * *

The world focused around Justin again, and he took a deep breath before paying attention to his surroundings. He closed his eyes, trying to brace himself to whatever was waiting for him now.

When he opened them he was a little disappointed. Everything looked the same as he remembered. The same as his **own** timeline.

He rose from his couch and walked towards the kitchen, taking inventory of everything. The walls looked the same, the floor looked the same. There wasn’t any clue of what he had done, or if he had done something.

There was no note tacked to his refrigerator.

He went to his bedroom, still trying to find anything, any sign that he had changed something, but he couldn’t find any.

In fact, it looked pretty much as his own time. As if the last seven jumps in time hadn’t happen at all.

“Oh, boy,” he muttered, suddenly realizing that he might be home.

* * *

Justin arrived to the Jive’s office building a little before ten, just in case. In his own timeline, he had had a meeting before everything had happened. That morning, Cameron had been in his bed and kissed him good morning before leaving to meet her agent.

He hadn’t even felt relief upon seeing her. He was feeling numb.

The first thing he did, however, was to call Joey, who had been home and quite surprised to hear from him.

He and Kelly were getting ready to drop Briahna at Chris’s house, because they were leaving to Chicago.

“Joey, please, don’t go,” Justin had pleaded in the very instant he heard the name of the city. “Please, wait until tomorrow. Don’t leave tonight.”

“Justin, Kelly and I have been planning this trip for months. I just can’t cancel,” Joey answered, trying to sound conciliatory.

But Justin had begged, all the way to Jive. He had first tried to blackmail Joey, then coaxed him, promised to reunite all the group, and finally almost cried until Joey finally realized that Justin was being serious, and had caved in.

Not before handing Kelly the phone.

Justin had been parked at the Jive’s parking lot for twenty minutes before he managed to convince Kelly to take a different flight, paid by Justin.

When he finally hung up, he had been crying tears of relief. He knew that if he was in his own timeline, there was a lot of work ahead to make *N Sync exist again, but at least he had managed to save Joey and Kelly. The Fatones were safe, and everything else could work.

At the Jive lobby, he was greeted by the cover of Future Sex/LoveSound with Keli, Outkast, Too Short and Pink. No sign of JC’s album or anything out of the ordinary. As he was directed to the elevator, he browsed briefly through the Jive directory. Backstreet Boys and JC were still there, and there were no other surprises. No Nigels 11 or Chris Kirkpatrick.

It was disappointingly normal.

Johnny’s secretary let him in the office, and Justin entertained the idea that maybe it all had been a dream. Maybe he had fell asleep while watching his old album and everything else had been a stress induced nightmare. The funny thing was that the thought didn’t made him feel better. Maybe after that first jump he had wanted nothing but to go back to this, but now that he had seen all the missed chances with the guys, all the futures without their friendship, the fact that he was back on the top felt somewhat empty.

“Justin, hi, I’m glad you could come,” Johnny ushered him on, inviting him to sit down. Justin didn’t even bother to really pay attention in the minute Johnny mentioned the Japanese release of FutureSex. He had been in that meeting already; he only needed to go through the motions of it.

“I’ll get that ready as soon as JC and I are done with his tracks,” he said once Johnny finished his speech. “By the way, when are we going to get JC’s release date?”

“What?” Johnny stopped in his tracks, surprised.

“You know, JC’s release date? We’re working our asses off with that album, so I was wondering when it’s going to come out.” Justin looked at Johnny, waiting for the answer. Even if he was back to square one, he was not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. Even if everything had been just a dream, he was going to change the future.

“Justin, you don’t need to worry about it,” Johnny smiled, still looking confused. “You have time to finish the mixing work. We’ll reschedule if necessary.”

“No, I don’t think that’s fair,” Justin rose from the chair, not wanting to spend one more minute there. “JC and I will probably finish tomorrow, so you will have the material. If you guys really wanted, it would be out in time for Christmas.”

“Justin, are you feeling all right?” Johnny frowned again. Justin shook his head. Why he hadn’t noticed that careless attitude about all his former bandmates before? He knew the answer. He hadn’t noticed until it had been directed at him,

“Of course,” Justin smiled. “By the way, Johnny, I should tell you. I’m planning to talk to the guys. All that stuff I said about how we couldn’t do anything more as *N Sync was totally wrong. I’m going to see if they’re interested in getting back together.”

“Justin, what are you talking about?” Johnny looked confused. “You know that pop groups aren’t exactly selling right now. You agreed it was a good decision to distance yourself as much as possible from all that.”

“Well, I was wrong,” Justin said, going out of the office. “You wait and see. If Backstreet could get back together, we can too.”

He closed the door behind him before he Johnny could answer.

* * *

Justin smiled, grabbing the wheel of his car at the Jive’s building’s parking lot. The meeting with Johnny had confirmed that he was back. He was right on the correct timeline and now all he had to do was to work into getting the group back together. It wasn’t going to be easy, he knew that both Joey and Lance were pretty much content with their lives at the moment, but if he could just convince JC and Chris, Justin knew they could get back together.

And of course, there was the matter of Chris. Chris had been happier in all the timelines where he was with a guy. Even the disastrous ones looked as if he had had some good times before Justin appeared. Justin had on good authority that Chris and JC were bisexual, Chris himself had told him, so he only needed to give him the right push towards JC and everything would be fine. The present might not be the perfect future, but now he knew what he had to do.

He pulled out his cell phone, and dialed memory five, Chris’s phone.

Chris didn’t answer, but he got Chris’s message machine. It was all right, Justin knew exactly what he was going to say.

“Chris? It’s me, man. You’ve probably talked to Joey who I’m sure told you I’ve gone nuts. And I probably did, but hey, we need to talk, and soon. So I’ll drop by your house as soon as I’m done with JC. Call me if you can.”

The world was in place again. He could work with that.

* * *

Practically whistling, Justin drove all the way to the studio feeling great. It was funny how everything had fixed itself in the same way that the mess had started. He only needed to talk to Chris, and fix everything. He didn’t even try to call Lance. He was sure that if he did a cursory search on the People magazine’s website, he would see the recent cover with the smiling face of his friend.

Since Joey wasn’t going to die, Justin felt in top of the world.

JC was waiting for him at the studio entrance, still dressed in that same pink shirt. Justin still didn’t know if he hated the shirt or if he loved it, since it was his touchstone. His way of knowing it was still the same day, and that this time, he had been in time to make things right.

Still, he didn’t say anything until they were inside the recording booth. He knew they had to work, so he went through the motions until they finished the first track.

“JC, I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to listen carefully,” Justin said, turning off the console. “I had the strangest dream yesterday. I suddenly was able to travel trough time.”

“That’s cool,” JC said, smiling.

“Not really,” Justin sighed. Now came the hard part. Explaining to JC why it might not have been a dream. “Everything kept getting worse. No matter what I did, the future always was worse. Except one time.”

“What happened in that time?” JC looked interested. But then, in every reality Justin had been in, JC always looked interested in his story. Except for that one time when Chris and Justin had been together.

Justin shook his head. He didn’t want to think about that reality. “We never disbanded.”

There was a long silence before JC put his hand on Justin’s shoulders. Justin turned to look at his friend, surprised to see the understanding smile on JC’s face. “J. You know that the hiatus is meant to be temporary, right? Chris never meant for it to be permanent.”

At that, Justin felt his blood drain from his face. That was something different. He remembered the discussion quite clearly. Chris had **always** been against the hiatus. “What did you say?”

“Justin, are you feeling all right?” JC asked instead of answering. He looked honestly worried.

“Don’t worry about that,” Justin took a deep breath. “JC, just tell me… whose idea was to take a break from *N Sync?”

Inside, he was chanting ‘please say me, please say me, please say me’. But part of him, a very large part, wished for it to be different. He didn’t want to be back home. He wanted to believe that his jumps were real. That he could still fix his mistakes, despite everything.

JC looked at him, with the intensity he reserved for complicated music sheets. “You’re serious,” he said, after a moment. “You really don’t remember why Chris needed time away from all this?”

Justin shook his head. He now had the proof he needed. He wasn’t home, not yet, and that meant that he had changed something else. Something bigger, if **Chris** of all people had asked for the group to temporary separate.

“Shit, Justin. That must’ve been a hell of a dream to forget that.”

“A hell of a nightmare,” Justin sighed, not bothering to say that he was still on it. “I did everything I could, you know? To try and fix things up. I talked to Chris, to myself… Even to AJ at one time. But everything I did just ended up making things worse.”

“Maybe that was the whole point of your dream,” JC said, with a sad expression in his face. “That some things shouldn’t be changed. You can’t control life.”

“I did,” Justin smiled, remembering the good timeline. “If I dreamed that again, I think I would plan the changes better. I’m pretty sure that knowing the future, you can change things for the best.”

“I don’t know.” JC got up from his chair, stretching his back. “I would be terrified of that power. Nothing comes without sacrifices, you know? And if you had got something for one change, that would mean someone lost something too.”

Justin nodded. That made sense, and he had experienced it, first hand. A couple of times, actually.

But JC didn’t know that he had finally gotten it mostly right. Sure, they weren’t together as a group, but that could be easily solved.

“I’m going to talk to Chris,” Justin finally said. “I’m going to choose to believe that my dream is a sign that we can be a group again.”

* * *

Justin arrived to Chris’s house around seven. Even if it wasn’t his timeline, he was not going to let Jive delay JC’s album any longer, so they kept working until every track they were supposed to finish were done.

He hadn’t asked JC if Chris was single, because he figured that their love life could come second to the group. If they were together, getting everything else fixed would be easier. He had to convince Chris, and if he had a partner, too bad.

“Hey, Justin, what a surprise!” Of course, he didn’t expect Howie Dorough to open the door. It shouldn’t have been that much of a shock, he figured. Chris had gone through almost all the Backstreet Boys already. Apparently, Justin just couldn’t find a timeline where Chris was with a woman.

“Hey, Howie. Is Chris home?” The one good thing about all that jumping was that he had finally learned how to roll with the punches. No matter what reality threw to him, he could act as if nothing was wrong.

He had to stop thinking in that lines, he knew. Every time he challenged reality, reality decided to bite back.

“No, he had a meeting with Nova Celete tonight. They’re getting ready to record,” Howie let him in. “Can I offer you something to drink?”

“Sure, a beer is fine thanks,” Justin sat on the living room couch, looking up surprised to see Howie grimace.

“Sorry, Justin, you know Chris and I don’t have alcohol in the house,” Howie said, tense. “I can offer you water, diet coke, or iced tea if you want.”

“Diet coke is fine,” Justin tried to sound calm. While he wouldn’t go and call Chris an alcoholic, at least no to his face, in the past years he had gotten used to see Chris with a drink in his hands at parties. Justin didn’t know if Chris drank alone in his house, but that was mostly because he never went to visit Chris at his house. Taking a deep breath, he decided to fish for more information. He knew Nova Celeste’s name. JC had mentioned Chris’s sister’s band a couple of times in his original timeline. “So Chris is doing the manager thing full time now?”

“He said he wasn’t going to, but you know Chris,” Howie smiled, bringing two glasses with him and giving one to Justin. “I think he misses the whole business side of everything, even if he won’t admit it.”

“You think he also misses the performing side?” Justin asked, curious, sipping his glass. That was an important question, if this Chris didn’t want to be on the stage anymore, it was going to be harder to finish his plans.

But Howie looked happy, and if Chris looked happy, Justin was going to try and make **this** work.

“Everyday, if you ask me,” Howie shook his head. “I miss it too, to be sincere. We both kind of envy you and JC for still doing it.”

It took considerable effort from Justin’s part not to look surprised at that bit of news. Since he had seen the Backstreet Boys in the Jive’s directory, he had assumed they had gone on and done Never Gone. Howie’s tone made it seem as if they hadn’t. “You could still do it, if you want to. I’m pretty sure that there’s still one more good record for both Backstreet and *N Sync.”

“A couple more for *N Sync, if you can convince Chris,” Howie laughed. “In fact, I will help you if, because I’m sure that he really wants to do it. But Backstreet is pretty much over, J. It just took us this long to accept it.”

“Oh, don’t talk like that Howie!” Part of Justin’s mind was wondering exactly why he was encouraging one his band’s rivals to record again, but the other part insisted that, if Chris was with Howie, he would want to see him happy too. And if getting the Backstreet Boys in the studio was what made Howie happy, well, Justin was going to help in that department too. “I’m sure if you talk to Kevin, he’ll come out of retirement at least for one more album.”

“Retirement?” Howie frowned. “Kevin hasn’t retired. Last I knew he was doing Chicago in Toronto, and he and Lance were talking about a new show or something.”

Justin nodded, dumbly. He had been sure that the only reason why the Backstreet Boys would stop recording was because Kevin had announced his retirement, even if they weren’t as stuck on the idea of all for one and one for all as *N Sync had always been. “I just got confused for a second there, sorry. But then why not try it? I’m sure you can get everyone to agree for a little studio time”

“It wouldn’t be the same without AJ,” Howie shook his head sadly. “We used to think it would get easier to accept he’s gone with time, but the truth is that we still miss him too much.”

* * *

Three hours later, Chris arrived to the house and Justin could see for himself how his friend had been doing. As in all the realities where he still was working doing music, Chris looked happy and living life at his fullest. This time, he was wearing his hair short, still spiked. He was wearing a black t-shirt without any logos on it, and there were almost no visible tattoos on his arms. As he was still thin, he looked as if he hadn’t aged a day after the Pop Odyssey tour.

“J! Nice to see you man!” Chris smiled at him, hugging him without reservations before moving on to softly kiss Howie on the lips. At least, Justin figured, this time he hadn’t alienated Chris by complaining or mocking his relationship with a man. Either he had grown a bit more open – minded this time, or the time difference between Chris getting together with Howie –and Brian the last time, his brain supplied- and the time he had got involved with Nick had been enough for Justin to change his mind.

Seeing Chris walk to the kitchen to grab a glass of water, Justin realized that in all the other timelines he had never really watched his friend with his partners, only in the one where he had been with JC, and that hadn’t been on purpose. He had just happened to be there while Chris kissed his then boyfriend.

So while he had assumed that Chris was the happiest with JC, the truth was that he really didn’t know. The only one with whom Justin was sure Chris had been miserable had been with AJ, and possibly with Brian, and even then he couldn’t be completely sure that they hadn’t been happy couples. For all he knew, those had been their only fights.

And now AJ was dead, and Justin couldn’t figure out how the hell he had managed to land in a reality where that had happened.

“How’s Taylor doing?” he asked, forcing himself to remember that he had to act normal. Even when he was now thinking that he had to get home, find out how AJ had died, and find the place to jump to stop that from happening, he didn’t want to miss seeing his friend happy.

If nothing else, Justin realized that it was a way to remind himself why he was jumping. Why it was important to get it exactly **right**.

“Every day bigger,” Chris shook his head. “I swear that I blink and I miss everything. They have the samples ready for me to start looking for producers.”

“Why not go to Jive? I’m sure Johnny could find them great management,” Justin offered. He wasn’t exactly sure of that, not given the way their manager was treating JC, but it was a possibility.

“I don’t want her to be promoted as the sister of an ex-*N Syncer,” Chris explained. “And you know that’s what Johnny would do. They’re talented, and they don’t deserve that treatment.”

“I guess you’re right,” Justin sighed. After that, the conversation went through some fairly harmless subjects for Justin. His album, future tours, his relationship to Cameron. Justin realized that there had been a reason why he had thought he hadn’t jumped at all, the only apparent difference between this timeline and the one he came from was that AJ had died.

And he couldn’t ask how or when that had happened, not without raising their suspicions.

He stayed an hour more, since he didn’t want Chris to think that he didn’t enjoy his company, not anymore. He broached the subject of an *N Sync reunion, but this time Chris shrugged him off, saying that they had done all they could do as a group, that it was better to move forward.

It was a kick to Justin’s stomach to hear his own words said against him now.

* * *

When Justin returned home, the first thing he did was to check his dvd collection. While he wasn’t as obsessed as Joey with collecting footage of the group, he always had a very good stash of it. It took him one hour to find the correct tape.

An interview with them all, in September 2001, for CNN. They were all dressed in black, and Justin could see Chris’s reddened eyes when the camera focused on him. They all talked about how terrible it had been to lose AJ, how no one had seen it coming.

There was no tape from any interview with the Backstreet Boys, but Justin remembered the interview he was seeing, more or less. Only that when **he** had done it, it had been because AJ had been admitted to a rehab clinic. Alive.

Justin didn’t remember that day particularly well, and even back then, he hadn’t paid much attention. He knew that Kevin had found AJ in his room, but not the particulars. A grim faced Lance explained that much on the screen, so the difference between what had happened here, and what had happened in Justin’s timeline had to be minimal.

Like Howie dating Chris.

“Shit,” he muttered, turning off his TV. He had already pretty much figured he couldn’t stay in that current timeline. Not when in every single other one AJ had managed to turn his life around. He just couldn’t live with the knowledge that he had exchanged a lot of their friends’ happiness for AJ’s life.

However, this clearly meant that he had to plan things a lot better. He wasn’t going to be taking any risks.

JC said that there was nothing to be gained without sacrifices, and Justin was determined to prove him wrong.

He was about to pull out the photo album to look for a new place to jump, determined to save AJ, when his phone started ringing.

“Fuck, no,” he muttered under his breath. He didn’t want to answer, and hear Lance, JC or Chris telling him what new tragedy had happened to the Fatone family. But he forced himself to do it.

After all, he had already decided to jump. He just couldn’t live with the knowledge that he had indirectly killed AJ.

“Hello?” he answered, bracing himself for the worst.

“Justin? Man, I just… I have to know, how did you know it was going to happen?” It was Joey’s voice, scared and nervous. But alive, and that was a small consolation.

“What do you mean, Joe?” he asked, puzzled.

“We saw the bulletin on the news during dinner,” Joey explained, calming down a little. “Kelly recognized the flight number. The plane we were going to take to Chicago, it crashed just half an hour ago. And if it hadn’t been for you, Kelly and I would’ve been there. So I have to know, man… **how** did you know?”

Justin took a deep breath. He couldn’t tell Joey the truth, not when he was planning to undo everything. Still, it gave him hope. He had been able to stop Joey and Kelly from getting to the doomed plane once, he could do it again.

“I had a bad feeling about it, Joe, I couldn’t sleep thinking that you guys shouldn’t be on that plane,” he said. “Look, I’ll talk to you later, ok? There’s something I need to do.”

“Sure. Kelly and I, we’re not going to Chicago anymore, so I’ll go to your place tomorrow, is that ok?”

“I’ll be waiting here,” Justin lied, smiling as he hung up the phone.

Now he knew he could fix things. He could save Joey, he could save AJ, and he could keep Chris happy.

It was just a question of finding the right photo, and pray that the doors still would open for him.


	9. Show me the meaning of being lonely

[   
](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/teenpeople.jpg)

  
Justin sat down in the middle of his living room, holding the final picture of the album in his hands, not daring to look at it.

He had lost the count of how many jumps he had made, how many different realities he had visited. He didn’t even know how many days had passed since the night when he had started jumping.

What he knew was that there was only one last picture with all of them together. He had managed to mess up every single time somehow, and now he only had that one chance to make everything right.

The first picture he had visited since the reality where AJ had died had been of the beginning of 2000, right before the Virgin Record Megastore event. He had managed to save AJ by talking on the phone to Kevin, but in the process he had lost Chris.

The less Justin thought about a reality where losing *N Sync had meant that Chris had spiraled right into addiction, the better.

In that one, Chris had been alone until the end. So Justin had jumped into the next picture, convinced that somewhere, somehow, there was a change he could do that would fix everything for the better.

It had gotten worse. There wasn’t a single timeline in which he managed to do the three simple things he had decided to do. He had seen Chris happy again, of course, in practically every timeline where he still had his friends, Chris was happy. Sometimes he had a partner, sometimes he lived alone. Chris’s happiness seemed to be the easiest thing to manage, as long as Justin’s younger selves didn’t mess things up.

He had seen Chris with **everyone** at least once, repeating a couple. With JC, mostly, and those realities were always the hardest to leave. With Howie also, but in those ones, AJ almost always ended up either dead or in a terrible shape.

Apparently, the fact that Howie had roomed with AJ that particular night was very important for the future, and Justin had kept it in his notes after the third time he had managed to get the Backstreet Boy killed.

There had been realities where Chris wasn’t with anyone in either *N Sync or the Backstreet Boys, but the relief Justin had felt upon finding the first one had been short lived. The world was simply not ready for the Kirkpatrick-Spears household, and that was another reality that Justin wanted out of his memories as soon as it was possible. He had even visited a timeline where Chris was living with Marshal Mathers, and strangely enough, that hadn’t been the worst.

The second point of his agenda, saving Joey, Kelly and Briahna from dying, was a lot harder. When he managed to warn Joey on time, something else happened. Worse than seeing Chris play magical chairs with his relationships, was the gruesome game of ‘what happened to the Fatones this time?’. It was as if no matter what he did, fate wanted to mock him. When he managed to get the Fatone family away from Chicago, there was a mugging in New York. Or a car accident in Tampa. Whenever it didn’t happen in time for Justin to hear the ominous bell of his phone, something in the past had been equally horrendous.

Fate’s favorite seemed to be the trapdoor in New Orleans.

In one of those timelines, Justin didn’t remember anymore if it was the one where Chris had been Aaron Carter’s manager with Lance, or the one where Chris had been single but living in JC’s yard, JC had told him about a Ray Bradbury story that more or less said that stepping on one butterfly could change the entire course of history for the worst. Justin hadn’t stepped on any bugs, not that he knew, but he was willing to accept that maybe somewhere he had pissed the time continuum off and Joey was the one suffering the consequences.

Still, saving Joey’s life wasn’t as hard as trying to get *N Sync back together.

He had thought that would be the easiest thing to manage. Jumping back so far that their troubles hadn’t even started yet should have taken care of the problem, but it just kept making it worse. In one reality, they hadn’t even recorded No Strings Attached, and so they had never become big enough for Jive to consider JC’s and his solo album. In that timeline, Justin and JC had been living together. JC said they were happy, and he wanted to believe that was true.

Still, when he had told the story to JC, JC had let him jump again.

“I wouldn’t change my life for anything in the world,” that JC had said. “But if you think it really can be better for you, go ahead.”

Justin had arrived to the past with his eyes filled with tears.

In another, they had stayed with Transcon two years more. That one was the worst of the lot, even worse than the one where Chris had died.

And now, sitting in a world where *N Sync had disbanded right after Pop Odyssey –like it had-, where he was hailed as the next King of Pop, and he hadn’t had that embarrassing moment with Janet Jackson in the Superbowl; where Chris was living still happy with Dani, Joey, Kelly and Briahna were safe and sound in their house, and AJ was sober and alive, Justin was getting ready for his last jump.

Because in this perfect world, JC had been killed in a car accident, two years after hiatus started.

There were three things without which Justin wasn’t ready to live. JC’s friendship, Chris’s friendship, and the lives of *N Sync.

But this was the last picture, and he had to make it count.

It was funny, somehow, that it was the last picture. He had thought that there were more, at least a couple, but for some reason, all the older pictures he had didn’t show them all together. There was always one of them missing from the frame. He should’ve noticed before, when he was going through 2000 pictures as if he had no cares in the world, but he hadn’t and the end result was that he only had that one picture taken the day they had first performed as *N Sync.

Somewhere, he was sure that someone was laughing at the irony.

In the picture, they were hanging together at the Pleasure Island backstage. He figured it had been taken an hour or so before their first concert, since they didn’t look tired yet. Chris was smiling, his arms around Joey’s shoulders, wearing a stripped polo shirt. Joey was wearing a white bonnet and a black shirt, hitting Lance’s shoulder playfully. Lance still had that ‘deer caught in the lights’ look on his face, his smile so big that it was obvious he was terrified. Justin looked happy, happier than he remembered being, with the most awful striped 90’s shirt. He didn’t even remember being that young and carefree anymore. JC was sitting close to them, with a strange smile that said that he had seen that type of antics many times before. None of them was looking at the camera. It wasn’t a photo opportunity, it wasn’t a photo shot. All those were too far away from them yet.

He looked down at himself. He had changed his jeans for an old pair of slacks he had bought second hand that afternoon after realizing that the reality he was in was even a bigger mess than the ones before, a reality where Britney had joined *N Sync as a female singer, getting him out of the group, and his white wife beater was covered with an old sweatshirt that covered his tattoo. If someone saw him on the street, he wouldn’t give him a second look. In his pockets, he carried five hundred dollars, all in old bills from 1993 to 1994, and enough coins to make a phone call and one old phone number.

One of the main advantages of his fame was that he had met a lot of interesting people, and knew a lot of weird stories of those people.

JC had told him that nothing could be gained without a sacrifice, and there was one sacrifice that Justin was very willing to make, just to fix things right once and for all.

Breathing deeply, he focused on the picture.

It was his last jump, and he was going to make it count.

* * *

The Pleasure Island club was not full yet when Justin appeared, next to the men’s bathroom. Just as he had planned, no one seemed to pay attention to him, even when he had just appeared out from thin air.

Encouraged, he went to the nearest pay phone and dialed the phone number he had brought along.

He remembered one party, back in 2005, when Cam had introduced him to Mark Wahlberg. At the time, it had been funny to Justin that they had never met before, even when Justin knew all of the old New Kids on the Block. At that dinner, Wahlberg and Justin had become friends, and the actor had confessed to Justin that he had always wanted to do something like what his brother had done for him. Give a young group a change.

Sure, in 1996, Mark wasn’t yet the big name actor he would become ten years later, but Justin hoped that particular dream had been born already.

“’lo?” Mark’s voice on the phone didn’t sound sleepy, and Justin hoped that meant he was in Orlando, as he had calculated before jumping. “Who is this?”

“Mark? You probably don’t remember me,” he said, quickly, and trying to remember all the conversations he had had with the actor. “But we’re friends. Close enough that you told me what really happened in that party three months ago. And I got something for you.”

“Who is this?” Wahlberg repeated on the phone, now sounding annoyed. “Look, man, if you want money to keep that story out of the papers, you’re barking to the wrong tree.”

“No, no, nothing like that,” Justin hurried to say. He was running short on time, and he couldn’t ruin this call. “My name is Allan Scott, we met in a bar, that’s why you probably don’t remember me. It really doesn’t matter, what matter is, you still interested in giving young singers a chance?”

“How do you know about that?”

“You told me,” Justin smiled. He had managed to get his attention. “And I know you’re probably thinking I’m going to start telling you about my nephew’s garage band, but no. Can you get to the Pleasure Island Club in less than forty five minutes?”

“I think so, why? You want me to hear your nephew’s garage band?”

“No. This guys don’t even know me,” that was true, Justin figured. He had changed so much in the last few weeks, he doubted he would recognize himself. “Just come. Listen to them. And if you like them, you’ll know what to do.”

He hung up, waiting for the nausea to come. But minutes passed, and he was still standing in the past.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Maybe I won’t jump until Mark comes.”

Trying not to think about what would happen if Mark didn’t show up, he got a table near the entrance of the stage. If nothing else, he would get to hear that first concert. He really didn’t remember much of it now, given that at the moment he was even more nervous than when he had won the beauty pageant.

It was only because he was really near the entrance to the stage that he heard the announcer and the club manager argue about the concert. It was absolutely chance that he saw the other man, the one he remembered had introduced *N Sync’ performance leave furious over a payment problem.

Later, he wouldn’t know exactly what prompted him to get off from his chair and offer his services for free, but at the time he didn’t had much time to think. The end result was that he found himself back on the stage where everything had started, getting ready to introduce the group.

He took a deep breath, trying to remember how they had been introduced that first time. But it had been so long, that he couldn’t actually think of anything, and he could see both the audience and the management start to get anxious.

“Hey, everyone,” he finally said, smiling brightly. “We got a wonderful surprise for you guys tonight. I’m pretty sure that you’ll be talking about it for years to come, and every one of your friends will envy you because you all have the great opportunity to see a very talented group of young men today for the first time ever in the whole world. Don’t take my word for it, just give it up for Chris, JC, Joey, Lance and Justin, *N Sync!”

The audience clapped as the lights dimmed, letting Justin walk away from the stage. As he did, he crossed next to Chris, and the only reason why he recognized him was because he had just seen him in the picture. It was the first time that he was the same age as his older friend.

“Hey, I meant what I said,” Justin whispered, quickly. “You guys will be big. And if you want a word of advice... there’s a guy in the audience that might give you a better deal than Transcon. Listen to him.”

Chris turned to see him, just a bit confused, before Joey hurried him in. Justin got back to his seat, and seeing as he still wasn’t jumping, sat down to enjoy the song.

It was a very weird experience, to see himself and his friends so young, so innocent to the world that they were just going to get in. But listening to them, Justin couldn’t stop the smile on his face. It was that why he was still trying. To get that feeling again. That happiness in performing.

Around the second song, he glanced over to see Mark Wahlberg come in, and, as the other man listened, Justin felt the ripple around his body begin.

He had made his last change.

* * *

Justin blinked as the world focused itself around him. He didn’t want to open his eyes at first, because he knew that when he did, he would have to face everything. Every single change he had done, that now was irreversible.

He looked down at his hands, to see a wedding band. Gold and bright, in his ring finger. That didn’t surprise him too much. He had seen more versions of himself married in the last ten or so jumps. It was as if every time he went back further in the past, there were more chances of him married.

Thankfully, he hadn’t repeated the marriage to Britney any single time.

Taking a deep breath, he looked forward, to the wall in front of him. He was back in his living room, a place that he had grown to fear a little. In front of him, there were his platinum and gold records. The ones for *N Sync’s debut album, the ones for Home for Christmas, the ones for NSA, including the big one for the record breaking first week sales. The ones for Celebrity, for Justified…

And four more.

Still Strong, One Night Stand, A Generation and Forever.

Trembling, he got closer to them, to see the names engraved on them. Sure enough, besides the names of the records, was *N Sync, embossed in gold and followed by their names.

Except for A Generation, which had also the Backstreet Boys’s names embossed on it.

“Oh boy,” he muttered, smiling. “That’s new.”

* * *

The problem of not remembering going to bed, Justin figured as he opened his eyes again, now lying on the modified king size he had in this reality, was that he never really knew what to expect. He had had his first taste of it when he had awakened next to Chris, and a couple more times since then.

He was never going to forget waking up next to Kevin Federline, for instance. He hadn’t even waited for the night in that particular timeline. He had gotten up, thrown up and then jumped away without even having breakfast.

In perspective, waking up next to a pregnant Kristen Richardson was not that bad.

“Hon, can you bring me breakfast in bed?” she muttered, hugging him. He tried to calm his breathing. Since he was going to stay in that reality, he couldn’t have a panic attack. “I’m in the mood for pancakes.”

“Sure thing,” he said, forcing his word to be normal. He could do it, he guessed, as long as he didn’t stop to think. “Be back in a minute.”

He got up, kissed her in the forehead and went down to the kitchen. As he did, he took on all the different things he could see in the house. The decoration that was still his usual style, but also a mixture of someone else’s taste.

Kristen. His wife.

The mother of his future son.

“Oh, shit. I’m going to be a father,” he realized in the middle of making pancakes for both Kristen and himself.

The prospect was new, and he smiled. He still thought of himself as single, and it would be a while for him to accept Kristin as his wife and not Kevin’s, but the idea of being a parent didn’t terrified him as much as it used to be.

He was going to try and be great at it.

“Chris called yesterday while you were at the studio,” Kristen told him when he returned, carefully putting the tray next to her. If his calculations were correct, she had to be around seven months pregnant. “He said they changed the meeting to 11:00 this morning. Sorry I forgot to tell you.”

“It’s ok. I can get there in time if I hurry.”

“Just remember, Justin. Chris promised they wouldn’t schedule the next tour until baby J. was born, I know you love performing, but don’t let those two bully you into agreed to anything before next year.”

“I won’t let Chris or Johnny bully me, I promise,” Justin smiled. If Chris was having a meeting with him, and Kristen was worrying about performing, that meant step three was accomplished. The records in his studio proved it so.

A quick call to Joey’s in his way to Jive would take care of step two.

He wouldn’t think about step one until he saw Chris.

“Johnny?” Kristen frowned, amused. “I’m worried about Kevin! I know that man can charm snakes when he puts his mind to it!”

* * *

It took only the phone call to Joey’s house to Justin to realize that he had made quite more changes than what he had hoped for. Joey had answered the phone, and joked immediately that ‘unlike others’ he didn’t need reminders of the group meetings scheduled by Chris. That hadn’t been Justin’s cue to wonder what had he jumped in. His clue had been Joey’s parting words.

“I’ll see you at Freelance, don’t worry.”

He had been half on his way to Jive at the moment, so he stopped the car immediately and started going trough his lists of numbers. Phone number one was Kristen, to whom he said he just missed her, and loved her, feeling a bit sick with himself for lying so quickly. Number two was Chris’s machine. Three was JC’s machine, four Lance’s machine, and he hoped that that meant that everyone else was at Freelance, wherever that was supposed to be.

He hit the jackpot with five, Nick Carter’s phone number.

“Dude, I can’t believe you forgot where your studio is,” Nick laughed on the phone. In the background, Justin thought he could hear Aaron talking. “I thought you had stopped drinking.”

“Shut up, I’ll explain later. Just tell me where it is,” Justin said, wondering why Nick was so friendly with him. With the exception of that first time, whenever the Backstreet Boys were friendly with him, it meant that Chris was dating one of them.

He sincerely hoped it wasn’t Howie. Not because Chris and Howie didn’t made a cute couple, all things considered, but because Howie dating Chris usually meant a dead AJ.

Nick told him the address, which was not far away from Jive’s office, and, on an impulse, Justin decided to fish for more information. “How’s everyone doing? Brian, AJ, the guys?”

“You really are confused if you don’t remember you’ve spent the last two weeks producing AJ’s solo album,” Nick was still laughing. “And Brian and Lieghanne are coming back in two weeks, or so he told me yesterday. I haven’t heard about Howie in a while, but I guess he’s really busy with the Foundation and everything.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Justin bit his lip. AJ was alive, Brian was married, Howie was somewhere. That just left two possibilities, and he wasn’t going to ask to Nick directly if he was dating Chris **again**. “Talk to you later, I’m late for a meeting.”

“Oh, fuck! Was that today?” Nick swore, and this time Justin was sure he heard Aaron yell ‘we’re going to have to bleep that, Nick!’ “Shit, I’m late too. Can you tell Kevin I was… doing something? Whatever? Like… a very big emergency?”

“Kevin will watch the show, you dork!” Aaron yelled, now very clearly. “And say hi to Justin for me!”

“I’ll think of what to say to Kevin, don’t worry Nick.” Justin hung up, confused but still relieved. While he was going to have to navigate his way very carefully, everything pointed out to the fact that this wasn’t a bad reality.

He just had to survive a meeting with Kevin, Chris, the rest of the group and apparently Nick, and then he could talk to JC. JC would explain everything, even if he didn’t understood why Justin needed the explanations.

* * *

The meting was strange, and Justin wished there was a way to know exactly what had happened to his friends’ lives while he was ‘jumping’. Apparently, if the quick look he had given to the company directory was to be believed, Kevin, Chris and Lance were in charge of at least other five groups. *N Sync and the Backstreet Boys were listed as part of the company, and so were Nick, himself and JC as well as some acts he didn’t recognize. And during the meeting, it was obvious that both Kevin and Chris took their roles very seriously.

“So, we’re all in agreement? AJ’s album will come out in September, the Backstreet Boys’s in April the next year to give time to AJ to do enough promotion work,” Kevin said, reading his notes. “And since *N Sync is on hiatus until Justin’s baby is born, JC and Chris will work in their respective promotion tours.”

“I’ll be helping Reichen with his book tour,” Lance mentioned, sitting next to Howie. It was surreal for Justin to see them all together. When he had arrived, everyone was there except for Nick. He had tried to excuse him, just as he had promised, but Chris laughed, asking everyone to pay up. Apparently, there had been a betting pool about who was going to arrive last, if Justin or Nick.

They were all friendly, working on both groups with equal devotion. As well as everyone’s solo project.

The contrast with Johnny, who had simply dismissed JC’s album in many timelines, Justin’s own in almost all the others, and sometimes even *N Sync’s future work, was sobering.

“I thought you were going to be filming a movie?” Brian was sitting next to Justin. The seating order was still confusing him, since it made the meeting look as a big group meeting, and not two groups.

“Not until December, and it’s a short appearance, really,” Lance smiled. “But I got JC booked in Ghost Whisperer, and Howie? You got an interview for 60 minutes next week so you can keep promoting the Dorough Foundation and the Lupus investigation.”

“Thanks, man.”

Justin tried to stay silent during the meeting, only nodding and giving non-compromising answers. Joey noticed, and asked if he had been brainwashed, but everyone accepted the explanation that Justin was still shell shocked over the fact that he was going to be a father.

Which was actually part of the truth.

Only JC seemed to notice that there was something wrong, since he kept looking at Justin with a strange look in his eyes. It was as if he knew that Justin had no idea of what they were doing there.

“Hey, J. Do you think you’ll have time to check on some songs I’m writing for the next album?” JC asked, casually, as the meeting was drawing to an end.

“Sure,” Justin felt incredible relief at the opportunity. Talking to JC, more often than not, helped him put things in perspective.

* * *

The recording studio was right inside Freelance, so once the meeting was finished, they simply moved downstairs. Justin was getting ready to listen to whatever JC wanted to show him for a while before trying to explain what was going on with him, when JC turned around and surprised him.

“What’s wrong J? You’re not yourself today.” JC said, looking at him worriedly. “Did something happen to Kristen?”

“No, nothing bad,” Justin hurried to say. The last thing he wanted was to worry his friend over a different thing to what was actually the problem. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Try me,” JC smiled. Justin knew that his friend would probably listen to him, but even so, like every time he tried, he had doubts.

“I’ve been living this same day for the last month or so,” Justin said, sighing. “But it’s not exactly the same day, because I also travel to the past, and I keep changing all our lives.”

JC blinked, twice, before smiling brightly. “You had me thinking that you believed that just for a moment, Justin.”

“I know it sounds insane, but it’s the truth,” Justin sighed. “I don’t know anything about this timeline. Yesterday, I left a time where I was dating Cameron Diaz. Today I’m married to Kristen Richardson, and she’s expecting my baby.”

“Kristen Richardson?” JC asked, looking truly shocked. “You **dreamed** that Kristen was married to **Kevin**?”

“Well, they were friends long before I met her!” Justin defended himself. The truth was that in his own world, he hadn’t met Kristen until long after the marriage.

“Sure, Kevin introduced you two and she’s his best friend, but still, that’s odd,” JC frowned. “You’re not going to tell me that you’re trying to find the way back to that, right?”

“No,” Justin smiled. He had had more than enough of traveling. “I like it here. I just needed to tell you so you could, I don’t know, coach me when I forget something important.”

“Like what?”

“If Kristen didn’t marry Kevin, who is the real Mrs. Richardson, for example?” Justin braced himself. He hadn’t had a chance to ask that last times Kristen had been Mrs. Timberlake. He just hoped JC wouldn’t say Cameron.

“Last time you called Chris ‘Mrs. Richardson’ he kicked your ass,” JC laughed. “That was seven years ago, I think.”

“Chris?” Justin almost fell off his chair. “He’s Kevin’s partner? How?”

“They say it happen somewhere between the time they spent babysitting all of us in Germany, and our first collaboration in Jive.” JC looked thoughtful. “Why you’re so surprised? Kevin is a great guy.”

“Yeah, but he hated our guts for years! Just because we were Transcon’s second group he acted as if we were stealing his idea or something,” Justin defended himself.

JC looked at him, puzzled. “Justin,” he said, very slowly. “We never signed with Transcon. We were going to, but at the last minute we went with Columbia’s offering. Don’t you remember that?”

Justin shook his head, although he felt like smiling. It had worked, he had done it. Things were going to work just right. “You think I’m crazy?”

“I think that you really believe that what you tell me is the truth,” JC said, sitting down. “And it scares me a bit.”

“That I’m going insane or that I could actually travel in time?” Justin tried to joke. He didn’t want JC calling Chris and Kevin to tell them that Justin had a nervous breakdown.

“Both,” JC admitted. “Sure, it sounds crazy, but even so it’s a little less scary than Brit’s nervous breakdown a couple of years ago. At least you didn’t decide that everything around your life was a reality show. Brit got over that, so you can get over this. But if it’s real and not a crazy dream of yours, well, it’s scary to think you have this much power over our lives, you know?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Justin said, although he knew that JC was right. He hadn’t stopped thinking about it before, but after messing things up so much in the other timelines, he had been terrified of the influence his actions were having on his friends’ lives. “I can’t do it anymore, and even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

* * *

Justin managed to get through the day without any more troubles. After his talk with JC, which ended with Justin promising he would go and get his head examined if more than two days passed and he still was confused over events and the natural order of history, he went back home to find it empty. Kristen had left him a note telling him she was going to her Lamaze class, and that she hoped he would be there for her next session.

Knowing fully well that JC would keep an eye on him, he decided to take his time getting to know his new reality, especially since now it was going to be home. The last twenty timelines or so had gotten him very used to the internet, and he had been always glad that the sites themselves didn’t change much. By timeline number 10 (Affectionately known as ‘the one where he and Britney had made a singing duo, what the fuck was that?’-timeline) he was quite versed on navigating to find the information he needed and he understood why Lance loved internet so much. He wouldn’t go and have an internet diary, like his band mate seemed to have in every single reality he had visited, but he could see its appeal.

While the timeline wasn’t the strangest one he had visited, it did had its weird moments. As JC had told him, *N Sync had never signed on with Transcon, and that had created a lot of changes. Lance had never gotten sick from exhaustion, for example, the delay on NSA had been due to creative changes and not a lawsuit, and the fabled rivalry between the Backstreet Boys and *N Sync didn’t exist at all. Just as JC had said, they had been friends from almost the beginning, and they had *helped* the Backstreet Boys to win their lawsuit against Transcon.

That had led to the creation of Freelance Inc., a company created to help both bands, which had led to both bands signing with Sony Entertainment instead than with Jive.

Nothing in the websites could tell him the story he was most interested in, which was why Kevin and Chris had ended up together. In all the other timelines, that had never happened. Kevin always held a grudge against the other group, and even when Chris had been dating his cousin, Kevin maintained a cold, but polite, distance.

What he could see was that after some point between Black and Blue and Celebrity, they rarely appeared in public not together. There was a picture of them at Justin’s wedding, Kevin quite elegant in a Versace suit, Chris wearing jeans and a jacket, smiling at each other. In the picture, Justin could see the outline of a ring on Chris’s middle finger, and the matching one on Kevin’s.

There was no announcement anywhere, but Justin supposed they had been together since somewhere around then.

Everything else pointed to a very happy reality, and Justin smiled. He had done it, he had managed to fix things, and now he only had to learn to live there.

It was four in the afternoon when the phone rang.

* * *

Justin didn’t remember how he arrived to the hospital. He barely remembered the phone call that had made him go to there. He remembered JC’s terrified account of what had happened, he could remember calling Kristen, asking her to join him at the emergency room. He barely remembered dialing Lance’s phone.

He had no idea how he had ended up in Joey’s arms, waiting for the doctor to tell them Chris’s status. He could only see Kevin, sitting straight as a ruler, away from everyone else in the waiting room.

“How did this happen?” He asked, more to himself than to Joey. He had fixed things, Joey was safe. Chris had never been in danger during the day of his jump, not one single time.

“It was an accident, the other driver ran the red light. Chris never saw it coming,” Joey muttered, softly. It was as if he didn’t want Kevin to hear. Justin didn’t want to hear.

Everyone was gathered there. Joey, JC, Lance, Reichen, Brian, Lieghanne, even the Carter siblings who looked a lot more subdued than what Justin remembered. Brian was silently praying under his breath, and Justin could swear that everyone’s eyes were puffy and red.

Finally, after a wait too long, a doctor came out, asking for Chris’s family. Kevin walked to him, explaining that they were out of town but had been contacted. He also handed the doctor a huge file, which Reichen explained was the legal paperwork needed for Kevin to act as Chris’s partner regarding medical decisions.

Justin couldn’t hear what was being said, but looking at Kevin’s face told him everything he needed to know. Kevin Richardson was, by far, one of the most stoic men Justin had ever known. In all the years, in all the timelines he had known Kevin, Justin hadn’t seen the other man broken. Not even when he had been the one to inform the world that AJ was in rehab, not in the multiple timelines where AJ was the one dead.

Brian was the one who went to his cousin once the doctor left, and Kevin let himself fall on the chair where he had been waiting for the doctor. Brian asked him, very quietly what was going on, and they all fell silent waiting for Kevin to answer.

“The doctor says there’s no hope,” Kevin finally whispered, sounding lost and confused. “Right now the only thing keeping Chris alive is life support.”

* * *

Justin didn’t say a word in the way back to his house. Kristen didn’t bothered him, just hugged him tightly before going to sleep while he went back to his studio.

It was useless. There were no more doors, no more pictures that he could use. He had done everything he could, sacrificed everything he knew, and in the end, it hadn’t made a real difference.

He had still lost his friend.

He looked at the pictures in the album, which were not doors anymore, just prints of moments in the past, wondering why he had kept going. He could’ve stopped in many other realities, where Chris was alive, even if he wasn’t at all happy. He could’ve stopped in any reality where Joey was alive, even if *N Sync wasn’t together.

But he had foolishly gone forward, and in the end, it had cost him Chris.

Kevin had told them that Chris’ had stated that he didn’t wish to be kept on life support, long ago. He would wait for Beverly and Chris’s sisters, but he would go on with his lover’s wishes.

Justin couldn’t believe that when he had finally realized how much Chris’s friendship meant to him, he was going to lose him.

He passed through the pictures, and as he did, he could feel his eyes getting wetter. He wasn’t ashamed of crying, not when everything he had done had been useless. He passed the picture of their debut, the last one he had used, the last one of them all together, and suppressed the irrational desire to tear it to pieces.

It was one of the memories he had of Chris, he couldn’t just break it.

After that picture, there were a lot of photos of the time before they became *N Sync, of the rehearsals, the times at Justin’s mom’s house. But none of them would bring Chris back, since there wasn’t a single one with all of them five together. There were many of them with Jason, but by the time Lance had joined the group, for some reason or another they hadn’t had any chance to take a group picture until the first photo shot, a week after the Pleasure Island concert.

He was about to close the album when a small ripple in one of the first pictures caught his attention. At first, he believed that it was just his imagination, his mind wishing to believe there was still one last chance to save Chris, but even so, not willing to let go that hope, he looked at it more carefully.

It was a very old picture, and Justin had almost forgotten about it. It had been taken at Universal studios, where he and JC had gone to meet up with Joey for JC’s birthday in 1994. They still hadn’t met Chris back then, and had no idea that they would become a group.

In the foreground, JC, Joey and himself where hugging, and Justin couldn’t stop the smile in his face when he thought about the fact that JC and Joey were so cool back then that they would hang with an over-eager 13 year old who listened to his mom too much.

But the important part was in the background, and Justin had to go and hunt for a magnifying glass to see that he wasn’t mistaken. They had taken the picture right outside the 50’s dinner, and in the background, Justin could make out the slim figure of the lead singer of the Hi-tones: Chris. There weren’t many people listening to them in the picture, maybe less than a dozen. So one of the families was pretty clear in the picture, and Justin swore under his breath, amazed at the coincidence.

He still remembered how Lance looked like back then, before the bleached hair, before the fame. And there he was, watching Chris sing, between Jim and Diane.

Fate had handed him one last chance.

Praying that this time he wouldn’t mess up, promising that he would give everything he had just for the chance to make things right, he concentrated on the picture until the ripples came and took him into one last jump.


	10. I'll be good for you

  
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](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/lastone.jpg)

  
The blazing heat of Florida in the summer made Justin doubt his location for a second, until he realized that it had worked, and he was once again in the past. Mindful that it was his last chance, he walked towards the old 50’s diner, calculating his time. All his jumps had been a few minutes or so before the pictures were taken, which meant he should catch the end of Chris’s act.

He didn’t dare to get too close to the dinner, because he didn’t want to run the risk of being seen by Lance or his parents. He knew that his own mom was around, but he doubted she would notice him.

Back in those days, his mom hadn’t paid much attention to anyone who wasn’t his younger self. It was part of the problem, of course. She had raised him to believe that he deserved to be the center of attention, and he had always believed her.

Even now. He knew what sacrifice he had to do, hopefully to keep his friends from harm. He had thought about it as he jumped, and now, while he heard Chris’s clear voice rising over his band mates’, he knew it was the only solution.

It still centered around him, and that was a bit ironic.

He wasn’t sure if it would ultimately help, but it was the only thing he could think off. He had to change everything from the root.

Himself.

That might not guarantee Chris’s happiness, or Joey’s safety. He knew that. But at least, it would guarantee that their career wouldn’t be shadowed by the constant attempts of everyone to push him to the spotlight.

That *had* to be enough. At least until he was back in 2006. He was already friends with the guys. He trusted that he could do what he had to do and then contact them again in time to save Joey.

Last time he had talked with himself, things had been a disaster. But even he had been different then, still believing that the important thing to save was his own career and not his friends. Now he was wiser, humbler. And his younger self was young enough to understand as long as he said the right thing. He only had to wait for the moment when Joey, JC and his mom let him out of their sight.

The only problem was that he no longer trusted his memories of the past. He had jumped so many times that the days before *N Sync had become a blur. He knew the basics, enough to get by. But he wasn’t sure that his memories were trustworthy enough to give himself the window he needed to make the change.

The Hi-tones set ended and Chris waved to the audience. Justin had to choke down the tears threatening to come out as he saw Lance and his family go away without giving a second glance. Not that they should, since Lance was still a year or so away from meeting Chris. At the time, he was probably thinking of graduation, or of a boyfriend back home.

Justin really didn’t know much about Lance’s life before *N Sync.

He held his breath when he saw Joey come down to talk to Chris, while his younger self and JC entered the dinner. There was his chance, as his mother was busy talking into her cell phone. Justin sighed. Knowing her, she was probably talking with his agent. Back then, she was looking for the next big thing for him, while they waited for the last MMC episodes to air.

As he entered the dinner, trying not to look as if he was following his younger self, Justin felt his heart lurch with pain. He hadn’t noticed at the time, he had always believed he was the center of his mom’s universe. But now, seeing her outside talking animatedly on the phone, remembering how many times he had been left with JC, or Chris, or Joey while she took care of his career, he wondered how much had been that Lynn cared for him, and how much was that she enjoyed being a stage mom.

He was thinking about it ten years too late, and he knew it. What he had to do was to make his thirteen year old self to figure that out.

He sat on a table not too far from the one that JC and his younger self picked out, almost at the back of the place. As he had hoped, a few minutes after they had sit down, JC had gone to the bathroom. That gave Justin five minutes, tops. And he had to be quick, because even then, he knew how it looked like when a stranger came to talk alone with a thirteen year old boy.

He just hoped people would see that they looked similar, and think he was related to himself.

“Justin? Do you have a minute?” he asked, and sure enough, his younger self turned around to see him suspiciously.

“Do I know you?”

“Not really,” he said. He wasn’t going to try and convince himself that he was from the future. “I was an extra once in the Mickey Mouse Club. I saw you, and I wanted to give you a friendly advice.”

“Sure, go ahead,” the kid, and it was odd to think of himself as a kid, answered smugly. Justin knew that so far, he wasn’t getting to him.

“Take the chance you’ve got now, and quit,” he said, and was rewarded by the surprised frown in his younger self face. A lot of well meaning grown ups had given him advice on his career, all the time. No one had ever told him to stop. “Have a normal childhood. Stop living for your mom.”

“I’m not living for my mom,” young Justin said, offended. “I don’t know who you think you are but…”

“I’m you,” Justin said, calmly. “Or more likely, you could become me. When I was a kid, I loved performing, and my mom loved me for it. She even got me in a beauty pageant, and I won. It was the greatest moment of her life. Then I got into acting, and later, a friend let me join his band. We were on the way to become great.”

“Then what happened?” Young Justin had paled at the mention of the beauty pageant. Justin still didn’t feel the pull of the jump, but his instincts told him he was on the right path.

“My ego happened. I forgot my friends, my mom got married again,” Justin shrugged. “Before I knew it, I was famous, and rich, and alone. One of my friends died in a plane crash with his wife and kid, and I just lost it.”

“And you ended as an extra, feeling miserable.”

Justin shook his head, smiling sadly. “No. Being an extra is fun. I could see my other friends again, I don’t mind that. That’s not the important thing, Justin. The important thing is… are you doing all this for yourself? Or because your mom tells you to?”

Justin’s younger self didn’t answer, and Justin knew that the kid didn’t really know. All his life, he had just done everything his mom approved, not stopping once to wonder if he really wanted to do it.

“She’s happy for me,” the kid said, defiantly. “She does all this for me.”

“Does she?” Justin asked. Now he was feeling a faint pull, his time was running out but he felt hope. He was getting to himself. He looked to the exit window, where they could see Lynn, still chatting away in her phone. “You know, I could kidnap you right now, and she wouldn’t even notice. Hell, JC and Joey are cool, but… how many mothers would let their thirteen year old kid hang around two eighteen year old guys? And how old is Chris? Twenty three?”

“How do you know about Chris?” Now young Justin was frankly terrified. Justin didn’t care. He just wanted to make sure he would get out of the business. Get away from Chris’s dream.

“I told you, I’m you,” he said, smiling without humor. “I know you probably think I’m a crazy stalker guy. If I remembered this encounter, I would have thought that. So even if I tell you that Chris’s going to call you with the idea of a group, and you, JC and Joey will spend the next year rehearsing your butt off for *N Sync, it doesn’t matter. You won’t believe me. I could even tell you that Jason will not stay, and you’ll end up calling a blond kid named Lance from Mississippi. You can tell that to JC. He’ll like the story about your old self coming from the future to warn you, even if he won’t believe you. I’m not going to try to convince you that if you stay, you’ll get to see one of them die in 2006, and it’s going to be all your fault because by then, it’s going to be too late. You’ll lose them, and then they’ll die. But all that can be stopped if you just stop. So I just want to you ask yourself, if you’re doing this for you, or for your mom. That’s all.”

“You’re lying,” young Justin said, his voice trembling.

“You think I’m saying the truth,” Justin answered. Before he could walk away, he felt the pull in the bottom of his stomach. Briefly, he wondered if he was hurting the timeline more by disappearing again in front of his impressionable thirteen year old self, but he found that he didn’t really care.

If that was what it took for him to believe that he had to stay away, he would gladly do it. He had already changed the future, which was why he was jumping. He just hoped that the sacrifice had been good enough.

* * *

Justin opened his eyes to the wall of a studio. It felt like his studio, the same one he remembered from many timelines, including the one he was almost sure was his original. But there were no gold or platinum records hung on the wall. Instead, he was looking at a bookcase.

He looked down to his hands, surprised and a little disappointed to see that he still had a photo album. The picture of JC’s birthday was still staring at him, Chris and Lance blurry figures in the background.

Bracing himself for the worst, he flipped to the next page, surprised to see that it wasn’t the photo he remembered, he and Chris at Justin’s house. Instead, it was a picture of Chris, JC and Joey, standing in what looked like Chris’s old apartment. Below it, in Justin’s old handwriting, he could read ‘*N Sync’s first picture’.

Puzzled, he started looking at the rest of the photos. They all were different, and Justin himself was in very few. In fact, judging by how the pictures were at first somehow out of focus, Justin could believe that he had been behind the camera, dutifully recording his friend’s advances, writing small notes in every single one. Jason was in a couple of them, but after January, 1996, he was replaced by Lance.

“What the hell?” he asked to himself completely puzzled.

“J? You’re back already?” Britney’s voice startled him, making him drop the album. On the doorway of the studio stood Britney, pregnant, holding her baby boy in her arms. She looked worried.

Scared, Justin looked down at his hand. There were no rings on his fingers this time.

“Oh, boy,” he said, and promptly fainted.

* * *

He woke up to see an unfamiliar white ceiling. He blinked twice, trying to get the cobwebs to disappear from his head.

“Where am I now?” he asked, trying to sit down.

“Oh, great! You’re awake!” JC was sitting next to his bed, and Justin realized he was in a hospital room. “Wait here, I’ll call a nurse!”

“I’m not moving, C,” Justin said, confused, as he reviewed the events of last night. He remembered jumping back, checking his album. He still didn’t know what he had changed, but it had been huge enough to change *N Sync’s whole origin. And Britney was in his house.

But JC was there, and he was his friend, and he was wearing the pink shirt of doom.

He still had time to save Joey.

He was trying to figure things out when JC came back, accompanied by a doctor, and Britney.

“How are you feeling, Justin?” the doctor asked, checking his pulse.

“Fine, confused, how did I end up here?”

“You fainted again,” Britney explained. “Scared me half to death.”

“Brit called me, and the paramedics, and when you didn’t woke up, they brought you here,” JC finished as the doctor finished his examination.

“Everything seems all right, do you remember what happened before you fainted?” The doctor, whose nametag read Jones, asked again.

“I was looking at my old photo album, nothing else,” he said. He didn’t mention the nausea caused by the time jumping. He didn’t want to spend the whole day locked up in the hospital while Joey could be flying to his death. “Can I go?”

“I’d rather keep you here for some observation, Justin. It’s been a while since the last time you were here, but if it was another panic attack, I’d like to run some tests to make sure everything is really in working order.” Dr. Jones told him and Justin bit his lower lip. He hadn’t registered the familiarity with which the doctor talked to him, but now that he thought of it, it surely meant that he was not a stranger in the hospital.

“I’ll come back tomorrow if you want. I just want to go home right now.” And he was going to have to come back. Now there were really no more pictures, so he had to make sure Joey, Chris and everyone else was fine.

The doctor turned to see JC, who shrugged. “I’ll keep an eye on him. If he gets dizzy or something, I’ll bring him back.”

“Very well, Joshua. But I’m only doing this because it’s been almost a year since the last time this happened. I trust you haven’t stopped taking your pills, have you Justin?”

“No,” Justin lied. He guessed that he maybe hadn’t, but there was no way of knowing without knowing what pills they were talking about.

“Have you had any changes in your routine lately?”

“We have been staying with him since last week,” Britney piped in. “I’m getting a divorce, so Justin was kind enough to let me stay at his house while my lawyer finishes the details to get my future ex husband out of mine.”

“That does count as extra stress, Justin,” the doctor shook his head. “I’ll let you go because I know that hospitals stress you even more, but I want to see you first thing in the morning.”

“I’ll be here,” Justin promised. If his timeline jumping had affected his health, he wanted to know.

But for now, he would conform himself with finding Joey in time to stop him from getting into a plane, and getting Chris to visit him at his house. Whenever Chris was going to see Justin, Chris was safe, so it was a good plan.

It was his only plan.

* * *

“I need my cell phone,” he said to JC, as soon as they were back on JC’s car. Britney had gone ahead of them in a taxi, since she had a meeting with her lawyer and she thought that Justin didn’t need the extra stress.

“Justin, the doctor said that you needed to rest,” JC told him, getting the car out of the parking lot. “Calling your agent after being unconscious all night is not resting.”

“I’m not calling my agent,” Justin insisted. At least he hoped Joey wasn’t his agent. “I need to talk to Joey.”

“To Joey?” JC lifted his eyebrows, confused. “I thought you saw him yesterday.”

“Please, C. I’ll explain everything, just let me talk to Joey.”

“Sure,” JC pulled out a cell phone out of his jacket. “But if he kicks your ass, it’s not my fault. Memory three.”

“Thanks,” Justin didn’t ask why JC was giving him his cell instead of finding Justin’s own, grateful to know that Joey was alive. He didn’t ask why Joey would kick his ass, waiting for Joey to answer.

“JC? I’m kinda busy right now,” Joey didn’t sound angry, and Justin smiled. He was still on time.

“Joey? It’s me, Justin. Sorry to interrupt, but this is important.”

“J?” Now Joey sounded worried. “Why are you calling me from C’s phone?”

“I’ll explain later,” Justin sighed. He was going to be explaining a lot of things later. “Just tell me, are you and Kelly planning to go to Chicago today?”

“Me and Kelly?” Joey frowned. “J, I haven’t seen Kel in weeks. She and her husband are in L.A. looking for a house.”

“Her husband?” Justin paled. That had never happened before. Joey and Kelly were a solid couple in every single reality he had visited.

“Justin, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just… got confused,” Justin forced himself to breathe. If he started acting strangely, JC would turn back the car to the hospital and he wouldn’t be on his house to keep Chris safe. “You’re not traveling to New York, either?”

“Not that I know of,” Joey sounded confused. “Justin, are you sure you’re all right? I know you said you could handle it, but maybe it wasn’t a good idea to let Britney move in with you.”

“I’m fine, Joey, really,” Justin said, chocking back his tears. His friends were worried for him, and he knew he didn’t deserve that. Not if he had managed to destroy Joey’s happy marriage.

No matter what he did, he always fucked up things.

“Look, the song break is almost over, but as soon as we’re done here, we’ll go around to see you, ok?” Joey sounded as if he was trying to clam Justin down, which Justin couldn’t understand. “You’re still in the hospital?”

“No, I… JC is taking me home,” Justin muttered in the phone. He felt tired, and defeated. He hadn’t fixed anything. Instead of talking to his younger self, he should’ve talked to Chris. To JC. To anyone who would’ve got him out and away from his friends.

“He’s what? Wait, no, just give him the phone, all right?” Joey half growled, scaring Justin. There was one thing that this reality was making clear, though. Something had happened to him in the eleven years that had passed, because everyone was treating him as if he was made of glass. Defeated, he handed the cell phone to JC.

“Joey wants to talk to you.”

“I figured,” JC said, taking the cell phone. “He’s fine, Joey. Dr. Jones wouldn’t have let him out if he wasn’t.”

Justin closed his eyes, not paying attention to the conversation that was going on behind him. It didn’t matter anyway.

He had failed.

And he couldn’t keep fooling himself. Everything was his fault.

* * *

They arrived home a few minutes later, and JC followed him to his room. The house had the same size he remembered but the furniture was different. Obviously, he was doing fine for himself. When he passed next to a wall clock, he remembered the other thing he had been repeating non stop.

“C, I have a meeting in Jive at ten, I’ve got to go,” he said. He didn’t really cared one way or the other, but he guessed he had to make an attempt at normalcy. JC just frowned, not moving away.

“I’ll call them and reschedule,” JC answered. “But I thought today was your writing day, you sure the meeting is today?”

There might have been something more than surprise in Justin’s face, because suddenly JC frowned.

“Justin, what’s wrong?”

“You’re not going to believe me,” Justin mumbled, looking at his foot. He was pretty sure that by the time he finished, JC would be dragging his ass back to the hospital, but he had to tell him. In all other timelines, JC had helped him. “But I’m not *really* the Justin you think I am. I’ve been traveling in time, changing everybody’s lives and fucking everything up because I’m an idiot.”

JC frown deepened, and Justin could almost see the wheels on his head turning. He was pretty sure he was going back to the hospital now.

“*You* have been traveling through time?” JC asked, carefully. “And changing *your* future?”

“I know that you really don’t believe me, C, you don’t have to act as if I was insane,” Justin sighed. “I ruined everything, and you warned me about that. You told me I should’ve left things well enough many times, but I thought I could fix things, and now I can’t travel again, and I ruined Joey’s marriage.”

“J, Joey has never married,” JC pointed out, softly. “And I never said I don’t believe you.”

“You believe me?” Justin looked at JC confused. While JC had never told him he didn’t believe his time traveling story, he had always assumed his friend was just humoring him when he gave him his advice. “You *really* believe me?”

“I know you believe it’s true, that’s always been enough for me,” JC told him, coming close to hug him.

Justin was about to ask JC what did he mean with always when the door bell rang.

“That must be Joey and Chris,” JC said, letting him go. “Then you’ll see everything is all right.”

Justin let JC go, not bothering to answer. Of course JC would think everything was all right. He didn’t know that in every other timeline, Joey had been happily married, and the proud father of a beautiful girl.

Still, he had to keep them in the house, at least until midnight. If they all were in his house, he could keep them safe. He had to manage to do that, even if he had failed with everything else.

He walked towards the living room, getting ready to pretend everything was fine, when to his absolute surprise, little Briahna ran to him, smiling.

“Uncle Justin!” she leaped towards him, and he had barely the time to register it was her, really her, before catching her in his arms.

“Bri?” he asked, blinking. It was impossible, his mind knew. If Briahna had been born, then Joey would’ve married Kelly. That was almost set on stone.

“I’m sorry, we had to pick her up from school and she heard me telling Chris that we were coming to see you,” Joey explained. “Bri, let Justin go. JC told us he needs to rest, remember?”

“Sorry, dad,” Briahna said, but she made no move to get away from Justin’s arms. He just held her, still not believing what his senses were telling her.

“It’s ok, Joey, I missed her,” he muttered, trying not to cry.

“You’re ok, J?” Chris asked, frowning. “You haven’t looked that spooked since, you know, Challenge.”

The mention of Challenge made Justin’s stomach drop. His first jump had been to a Challenge, when he had started messing everything. And now he had to figure out what had he done, and how to live with it.

“I’m fine,” he lied, and forced himself to smile. “Just glad to see you guys, it’s been a while.”

“Sure,” Joey snorted. “JC practically lives here, and you were a guest in our show last week, and don’t you have a joint signing with Reichen this month? Face it, Justin, the only way you would be seeing more of us, would be if we were touring again.”

* * *

It didn’t take three hours of talking about nothing for Justin to realize that everyone was worried about him. Around noon, Lance dropped in, since he was on his way to meet Reichen in New York and Britney had called him.

“I faint often?” he asked JC, when they were alone in the kitchen getting everyone drinks. It didn’t surprise Justin to find out that there was no alcohol in his house.

“Not since 2001,” JC told him. There was something in JC’s eyes that Justin couldn’t decipher right there, but he figured he couldn’t ask with the group in his living room. “Before that, often enough to make us really worried when it happened again.”

2001\. Again, the year when he had first jumped to. Justin shook his head, confused.

“Is that why we’re not recording anymore?” he finally asked. He knew that *N Sync had existed, his photo album proved that much. And he knew he had been part of it, because the guys acted as if he had. So he needed to know why they weren’t together as a group anymore.

“No, we’re not recording anymore because I still feel guilty about bullying you into joining,” Chris said from the door of the kitchen. “You’re really ok, Justin? Joey only told me you sounded almost hysterical when you called.”

“I just had a bad feeling, that’s all,” Justin shook his head. He had to act normal, and later he would ask JC what Chris meant.

There were too many questions, and he had no idea how to start asking them.

“Well, you scared us a little, J.” Chris came closer, hugging him with one arm around his shoulder. “Don’t do that again.”

“I don’t think I will, don’t worry,” Justin answered, smiling and letting them lead him back to the living room. “What are you guys doing tonight?”

“I’ve got an early flight tomorrow to New York to meet Reichen,” Lance said first. “But no real plans for today. Actually, I don’t even have a hotel so if any of you can give me asylum for tonight, it would help me a lot.”

“You can stay with us, Lance,” Joey offered, bouncing Briahna in his knee. “As long as you don’t mind getting up early when we get Bri to the bus.”

“You could even do your godfatherly duties and get her ready for the bus,” Chris joked, handing Joey a glass. “Let us sleep late for a change.”

“As if you ever wake up in time,” Joey laughed. “Anyway, as you can imagine, Justin, we’ve got no plans.”

“What? Chris is not going to spend all afternoon at the studio? I thought your album was almost ready…” Lance asked, confused.

“Something came up,” Chris shrugged. “We’re doing too well with the radio show, so there’s a bit of rescheduling to be done.”

Justin nodded, dying to suggest that maybe they could talk about a new *N Sync album, get studio time together again, but still too confused to actually voice it out loud. Instead, he asked Lance about Reichen’s book and let his friends take control of the conversation.

* * *

It was close to seven when Lance, Joey, Chris and Briahna left. It was obvious to Justin by then that Chris and Joey were together, and had been for a while. That was yet another new thing. In all the other timelines, Joey had been with Kelly, so the possibility of Chris and Joey together had never crossed Justin’s head. In fact, it had taken a while for him to realize they were a couple. Their attitude around each other was just like the one Justin remembered, close friends, joking around about everything. And it was obvious that both were happy. It was not exactly like in his timeline, but Joey’s eyes lit up when he smiled at Chris, just as they had once for Kelly.

Justin had asked them five times to call him as soon as they were home, still remembering Chris’s fatal accident from the last jump.

“I can stay with you if you want,” JC offered, and Justin accepted, mostly because he didn’t really want to let any of the guys out of his sight. Once they were alone, JC walked with Justin to his studio. “Do you want to write for a while? I know you don’t like interruptions, so I can find something to entertain myself.”

Justin looked at the desk in his studio, at the ebook closed on top of it and nodded, not trusting his voice. Both JC and Lance had said he wrote, and the best way to figure out things without making more awkward questions to JC was to look for the same sites that had helped him along the way.

If he could find out what he wrote, it would help a lot too.

Once JC left the studio, Justin opened the laptop. While he waited for the Google search to work, he looked at the books in the shelf next to the desk. There were only five small paperbacks and one hardcover on the shelf, and Justin grabbed the hardcover, curious.

The cover was a black and white picture of the Pop Odyssey empty stage, and the title of the book was, appropriately, Empty Stage. Turning it around, Justin read the back blurb, realizing that every answer he wanted was in his hand.

It was his own autobiography, from his days in the Mickey Mouse club to the first days of the hiatus. Surprisingly the quotes from critics seemed to be good. Before opening it, he looked at the first paperback. The cover showed what looked like a brain, mapped like a highway. This one was called Mind Labyrinth. Not a very descriptive title, in Justin’s opinion.

What surprised him was to see his name under the title. All the other paperbacks were also written by him.

Curious, he turned off the computer and opened Empty Stage.

* * *

By the time JC came to ask him if he wanted to have some dinner, Justin was up to chapter five, more and more intrigued. The beginning of the book didn’t have anything he didn’t know already up to the moment when they told him that the Mickey Mouse Club was over, everything checked with his own memory.

The beginning of Chapter Three proved that he wasn’t insane.

 _I had my first panic attack on August 9, 1994 although we didn’t know what it had been until much later. I remember clearly that we had gone to celebrate JC’s birthday at Universal, Joey had planned to introduce us to a friend of his who worked there, and my mother had offered to chaperone for a while although she soon was immersed in the only thing she liked to do around me: making sure I would still have a career after the Club was over. A guy who had worked with us came to our table, probably just to say hi, and the next thing everyone knew was that I was screaming, scared out of my head, convinced that I had seen a guy disappear in front of me. Of course, that last part had been just a stress induced hallucination, but when I was thirteen, I was convinced it had really happened._

 _My mother had been livid, threatened to sue the park, JC, Joey… everyone who had been close to me. What I remember the most of that panic attack was not the hallucination, or the seemingly endless tests that followed. I know all that happened, because I still have some of those studies’ results, but I don’t really remember them. What I do have clear in my mind was that mother never asked me what had happened. It was then when I realized that she wasn’t worried about me. She was worried about the kind of scene my attack had caused._

 _At thirteen, I realized that most of my life had been spent fulfilling my mother’s dreams, and she didn’t seemed to understand that to love me she didn’t need to share me with the rest of the world._

“Oh, boy,” he muttered, closing his eyes briefly. When he had jumped, he hadn’t really cared about the immediate consequences of disappearing in front of his younger-self, or even in front of Chris a couple of times. It didn’t explain why the others acted as if the panic attacks were a common situation. The final outcome of that first panic attack had been that Justin had, with Chris and JC’s help, hired a lawyer and emancipated himself from his mom.

Because no matter how much he begged, she never stopped acting like his manager.

 _I never wanted to join *N Sync. Chris, Joey and JC knew it from the beginning, when they started their rehearsals with Jason. I would stay with them, because things with my mother weren’t getting better or easier to deal with, but I never joined at that point. *N Sync was supposed to be a quartet, and I was enjoying going back to school, starting to live like any other teenager. But then Jason quit, Lance came on board, and Lou Pearlman told Chris that the only way he would back up the group was if it was a five member group. I knew most of the songs, and I knew how hard it had been to replace Jason in almost the last minute, so when Chris asked me again, I caved in. I really enjoyed those years, and Chris, Joey, Lance and JC became the brothers I didn’t have, but I won’t lie. I was terrified of going back on the stage, even if back then we didn’t know how big *N Sync would become._

 _I would’ve probably kept on going, because I loved being with my friends, if it hadn’t been because the panic attacks kept happening._

 _They got worse when Lance got sick. Because then, when Lou seemed more interested in my health than in Lance’s, even when Lance was in the hospital, I figured it out._

 _It became completely clear in my mind when I saw everything around me started to unfold._

 _It was my fault._

 _They said it was Chris’s fault, Lance’s fault for working too much, Joey’s fault for being Joey. Mom even blamed JC. Her golden rule, the one she repeated to me every time since I could understand her was that no matter what happened, it wasn’t my fault._

 _Even when I knew it was my fault. Everything bad that happened to the guys was my fault._

 _But I’m getting ahead of myself._

He had just started reading about *N Sync’s time in Europe, when the phone rang. He waited, holding his breath, knowing that JC would answer it, and sure that some catastrophe would be announced.

He waited for five minutes, before closing the door and going to meet JC, who was just hanging up the phone.

“Who was it?” he asked, dreading the answer.

“Chris,” JC answered calmly. “He forgot he had promised to call as soon as they were home. He was very sorry about that.”

“But he’s alright?” Justin pressed on, not wanting to hope. “He, Joey, Briahna, Lance… they all are alright?”

“Yeah, Justin, they’re fine,” JC said, coming close to hug him. “Don’t worry. Everything is fine.”

And as the clock rang midnight, Justin started to cry. At least, he had finally gotten that right.


	11. Epilogue. More than a Feeling

[   
](http://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g123/luxshine/forfics/last.jpg)

  
Justin was putting the first copy of his newest book on the shelf when he saw the old photo album on the coffee table. Curious, and more than a little nostalgic, he picked it up.

It had been ten years since he had opened that album, still afraid of the power only he believed it held. He had wanted to get rid of it originally, but both JC and his therapist believed it would be a sign of healing when he could open it without fear, so it was still there, reminding Justin of those insane months in which he kept jumping in time, relieving the same day over and over again.

Even when he knew that the old pictures were closed, that he couldn’t jump again to the same times he had jumped to already, he still feared it a little.

Gathering his courage, he opened it. The first picture was still the one of JC’s birthday, the last jump he had made. Joey, JC and his younger self, the one he had traumatized for life, smiling at the camera. Behind them, the blurry figure of Chris, and the Bass family watching Chris. Behind them, a strangely familiar figure in a gray sweatshirt.

Frowning, Justin adjusted his glasses. He knew that sweatshirt, it was still hanging in his closet.

“Impossible,” he muttered. But curious, he pressed on, flipping the pages until he found the Pleasure Island pictures. The one he had jumped into, where they were smiling at the camera, was still there. And behind Joey’s head, he could see again the same gray sweatshirt, the hood pulled up so he couldn’t see the face of the man wearing it, but he knew it was himself.

His twenty six year old self.

He wasn’t in every picture he had jumped to, but he was in many of them. And he was in others. There was no sign of changes in the Daily Show picture, for example, but a second picture that showed the crowd had part of an arm in the first row. And in the arm, Justin could see his cross tattoo.

All the jumps were there. And he knew that if he compared the dates of the pictures with the dates of his panic attacks, described not only in his book, but also in the diary of the psychiatrist this version of himself had been seeing since he was fifteen, he would see that they matched every one of his jumps.

They all had happened. It hadn’t been just one thing that had caused the different timelines, it had been everything. Him, traumatizing his younger self. Him, introducing *N Sync for the first time, calling his own name last. Telling Chris not to sign with Transcon, even if in the end Chris had done so because the young Justin, the one who had decided he didn’t want anything to do with the show business anymore told him to. Telling Chris to keep an eye on all of them. Bumping into a table, talking to himself again in the Grammys, and this time causing his younger self to spend a week in a psychiatric hospital due to the panic attack that followed. Telling Chris that Lance was gay, even though Chris already knew it.

He had almost driven himself crazy, trying to go back to that time when he had been the only one who mattered.

There was one picture almost at the end of the album, that Justin didn’t immediately recognize. It was himself, twenty six years old, writing in his studio. He was turning to see the camera, frowning. While it had taken a while to teach himself how to write, now Justin understood his other self even though it was hard to get the words out when someone else was watching.

The picture rippled.

Scared, Justin closed the album. He didn’t want to risk losing everything again. Not when he had found what was really important in this timeline.

He had his friends, and they were happy. They had even recorded one more album, after Chris finally released the Nigels 11 debut; but by then, Justin had found out that he really enjoyed the work behind the scenes more. As none of his albums existed in the timeline, he had re-written all of his songs, and gave them to Chris, JC and the Backstreet Boys, who were still together once this Brian had convinced his cousin that it was possible to raise a family *and* be part of a band at the same time. By doing that, Justin had started to make a name for himself as a songwriter, and from time to time he still collaborated as a producer. The one thing he didn’t do was go up on the stage.

And as the years passed, it was less of a sacrifice and more of a comfortable choice. Putting the album away, his eyes rested on the framed photograph on his desk, where he and his lover of five years smiled at the camera.

He had sacrificed his fame, fortune and the chance of perform in front of the public. But he had gained everything that really mattered in exchange.

Still smiling, he turned off the lights of the studio and went downstairs to meet with his friends.


End file.
